COVID-19 and Air Quality in the United States

This project aims to investigate the relationship between long-term average exposure to low air quality and the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization in the United States. The project uses two data sources: (1) Air Quality Index (AQI) data from 1980 to 2021 and (2) COVID-19 case surveillance data from 2020 to 2021.

Data

Air Quality Index (AQI)

• Time frame: 1980 - 2021
• Records: 11,570,188
• File size: 36,762,558 bytes (943,967,046 bytes uncompressed)
• Number of files: 42
• Location: https://aqs.epa.gov/aqsweb/airdata/download_files.html.

COVID-19 Case Surveillance Public Use Data with Geography

• Time frame: 2020-01-01 to 2021-11-09
• Records: 37,532,072
• File size: 109,903,673 bytes (5,304,693,020 bytes uncompressed)
• Location: https://data.cdc.gov/Case-Surveillance/COVID-19-Case-Surveillance-Public-Use-Data-with-Ge/n8mc-b4w4.

Questions

The project will answer the following questions:

• Did the lockdown result in a noticeable improvement in air quality? Most notably in what regions?
• Is there a correlation between Air Quality Index (AQI) and COVID-19 hospitalization rate?
• Are there any confounding factors you should control for?
• How would you present the results visually? How do you label your axes?
• How did you treat missing data?

Methodology

The analysis will be conducted using statistical methods and data visualization techniques