Introduction
This past year has been life-altering for not just me but people all over the world. The world as a whole had been shut down from a pandemic caused by Covid-19. It affected everything from the economy, putting millions out of jobs, health, millions dead, or suffering from some form of long-term covid related health complication/mental health issues. But now, with the arrival of the vaccines, many thought the end of this horrible nightmare was near. And they were right with the world finally getting vaccines from pharmaceutical companies like Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J quarantine, social distancing, and mask mandates were finally being lifted. Yet some skeptics, mostly internet know-it-alls and conspiracy theorists, believe that there is no correlation between vaccinations and covid cases/deaths. My question is, are they right, or is there some correlation between the two?
Visualizations That Inspired me to ask this question
Seeing this chart helped me to understand what the current situation of COVID was like with NYC. From here, you can see all COVID-related cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were decreasing. The chart also used clarified these trends were not just one day’s worth of data but an average of an entire month’s data collection. Seeing as most COIVD related subjects were on the decline, I wondered what was prompting that. Although masks and social distancing are a big part of containing infection, NYC experienced multiple surges of COVID even with those protocols. The only outlying factor was vaccines, as they are still are relatively new and didn’t exist or weren’t widely available during those surges.
Upon further investigation, I ran into this chart to see that NYC had nearly vaccinated over 50% of its resident in the last three months. Noticing that the vaccination rate was increasing while the COVID rate decreased, I decided to make a side-by-side comparison of the two results.
Softwares Used to create visuals and Databases
To test my question, I used Tableau, a visualization tool used for detailed data analysis. I used NYC Open databases to find numbers and data visualizations related to vaccinations and cases. This finally led me to the public GitHub, where CSV records daily numbers are kept and used for updates. After downloading the CSV files form GitHub I used Tableau to create visuals to better represent the trends in Covid cases and vaccinations.
NYC COVID & Vaccination Data: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.page
GitHub Vaccine Data: https://github.com/nychealth/covid-vaccine-data/tree/main/people
GitHub COVID Data: https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/tree/master/trends
My Visualizations and results
This graph created by me shows how COVID hits in waves and just how many people were infected because of it plus how many died. The graph showed when the waves initially hit and how long they lasted.
What this graph is showing is the number of vaccines given since it was first released to the public. It show how many were partially vaccinated and how many were fully vaccinated. Once I had my two charted I decided to create a dashboard showing both charts in order to see the trend more clearly.
Using the date filter option available within tableau I created a dashboard that compared the two charts side by side starting when the vaccine first came out. Immediately the trend was apparent as more and more people got vaccinated slowly but surely the number of Covid cases and deaths were on the down trend. In fact it went from around 6000 infections daily to around 300 infections daily. That’s a 95% decrease. From around a 100 deaths daily to less than 10. That’s around a 90% decrease. While social distancing and masks may have helped contain the spread it was the vaccines that was truly contributing to the near end of COVID.
Reflection
My thoughts on using Tableau are that I found it somewhat challenging to create visuals as I had a hard time understanding the parameters and fundamentals of creating a chart on Tableau. I made the visuals using a guess and check method throughout this lab to see what works and what doesn’t. This was probably because of my comfortability with Excel, where I can directly manipulate the data to create a chart showing whatever I like. I want to run more test trials using other datasets and understanding how the visuals system works.