Starting in March, the COVID-19 US State Policy Database has cataloged 100 policies enacted by various states and the District of Columbia to combat the medical and financial woes of the pandemic.

The discussion of best practices for containing COVID-19 has become another front in America’s culture wars. Do lockdowns suppress the virus? Should masks be mandatory? What about bolstered unemployment benefits and freezes on evictions to help with the economic fallout?

Julia Raifman can’t broker peace, but she does oversee the go-to information warehouse on these questions. Starting in March, Raifman, an assistant professor of health law, policy, and management at the Boston University School of Public Health, has been leading a team of about 30 grad students in creating the COVID-19 US State Policy Database (CUSP).

With scores of state policies in the database, Raifman and her team update it weekly or monthly, depending on the topic, prioritizing “policies that are most relevant to people’s health and well-being in the present moment,” she says.

Making the database public was crucial. “I knew that the harms that COVID and its economic ramifications would cause were so much larger than any one research team,” Raifman says. “I wanted everyone who could work on these topics to have access to this database if it would help them.”

“I also had limited ability to take time for deep thought and careful data analyses while working from home with an infant and no childcare from March through August. The database was something I could contribute in my limited capacity to work in two-hour periods as my husband and I took turns caring for our baby.”

Read the full article about the database for state COVID-19 policies by Rich Barlow at Futurity.