Covid Policies Data Across the United States

INFO 2950 Project

Project Abstract

In this project, we are going to look at the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and the type and number of policies that were used to address the situation. We found a data set collected by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that details the start and stop of various covid policies and which state or county put it into place. For context, this data was collected after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States of America and thus serves as a comprehensive data set for our analysis. Our motivation for the project is to analyze the number of policies and their type used across the United States in hopes of determining any patterns or changes in COVID-19 policies in relation to time and geographic location. Using this data set and the given context, we hope to answer the research question of how do the number and type of COVID-19 policies differ depending on the region in the United States?

First we analyzed the number of different COVID-19 policies per state. To visualize this, we created a horizontal bar chart faceted by geographic region where the y-axis represents the different states that make up the respective region, and the x-axis represents the number of COVID-19 policies enacted in the various states. From this visualization and following analysis, we were able to determine that Colorado and Virginia passed the most COVID-19 policies, and the "West" region passed the most COVID-19 policies overall, suggesting that states in the Western US were most concerned about the passing and spread of COVID-19

Second we analyzed the number of policies throughout the months of the pandemic. To do this we utilized a line plot where each different colored line represents a different COVID-19 policy type in the hopes of gaining further insight into how the United States reacted to the pandemic. From this analysis, we found that healthcare-focused policies were the most common at the very beginning of the pandemic, before phase-based policies became the most common several months later.

In the future we hope to explore if COVID-19 was handled the best (least number of infections) in states and regions that passed the most policies, and use this study to inform future pandemic preparedness.