When the novel coronavirus pandemic hit earlier this year, the State Department faced the monumental feat of swiftly and safely bringing home Americans positioned across the globe.
To do so, officials tapped into a range of relevant data sources and produced new, data-driven products to help senior officials prepare and prioritize the agency’s repatriation efforts.
“We, a couple months ago now, sprang into action to support our COVID-19 Task Force on a variety of products. But I think in terms of really incredible outcomes, one that’s top of mind for me is our work on supporting the Repatriation Task Force,” Janice deGarmo, the agency’s first-ever acting chief data officer and deputy director in the Office of Management Strategy and Solutions recently told Nextgov. “In that situation, we built a central repository for the Repatriation Task Force, where we were able to collect, and analyze, and track data that informed decision-makers to repatriate over 90,000 Americans from 135 different countries.”
Things are moving fast for the agency amid the global health crisis—since the mid-May conversation and as of May 27, State has coordinated the repatriation of 95,083 Americans on 1,017 flights from 136 countries and territories. Behind the scenes of each of those moves is the department’s Repatriation Task Force and the Coronavirus Global Response Coordination Unit, or CGRCU.
Though the State Department also unveiled in mid-May that it’s recruiting a new CDO (who will eventually report to deGarmo), the acting official in her current role leads the agency’s relatively nascent Center for Analytics—or state department harnesses bring americans safely during pandemic
