Over the past year, I've worked on a few coding projects. Before doing so, I took courses on Python for Data Science and Machine Learning and Python for Web Development. I then used what I learned to compile a comprehensive COVID-19 data set, with data on COVID-19 statistics and demographics all on the county level. Using the data, I performed analysis and published articles detailing key takeaways. Finally, I used the data as a backend data set in a Python-based web application to shed light on the current state of COVID-19 across the 3,000+ counties in the US.
In August 2020, I looked to see if the relationship between an area's demographics (minority composition, education, population density, etc). To do so, I first began finding county-level data. Using Python, I found data from the following sources:
I then combined the data together to produce a data set containing 3,000+ counties with the information above for each. I added additional columns like infection rates and mortality rates using tallies.
Then, I sorted counties by their infection rates and began exploring the characteristics of the counties with the highest and lowest infections.
I summarized my findings in that analysis through an article in Towards Data Science on Medium. Click the image to the right to check it out.
My next goal was to make the data present in the data set available to all by making quick information on a county's infection risk, mandates, and vaccination status accessible to all. I began by adding information on vaccinations from the CDC. I then set up an AWS instance to contain my data, where it would be updated every hour with the most up-to-date data from each source.
In order to begin building the web application, I learned a web framework called Flask, which uses a Python backend and an HTML frontend. I created multiple pages, each with its own purpose:
A an individual county's situation (Data)
The entire country's situation visually represented (Stats)
An opportunity for correlation exploration between two county-level attributes (Explore)
I connected my data set with my framework and deployed the application on Heroku. Check out the application here or use the embedded version below.