enter data

When caseworkers enter data on a case, they are given a choice of reasons for why a case was closed, including death.

They could enter data about their outlet to test different models.

The health department’s highly trained specialists “didn’t have the capacity to be the epidemiologists that we needed them to be because all they could do was enter data,” said Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer, who also heads the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Instead, I am seated at a desk, where I have to manually enter data from tax forms into a very, very old computer.

The conditions are subpar: Scanners sputter, forcing workers to enter data by hand, staplers are scarce and piles of tax documents overflow from carts.