Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health staff have worked tirelessly to make sense of the extraordinary volumes of data coming at them at different times and in different ways. Because much of this information is unstructured or non-standardized, epidemiologists, scientists, and others must first bring these data into alignment before the real work can begin. The more differences there are in the data, the more painstaking the is work for people on the frontlines trying to put the pieces together fast.