The effect of the climate on the spread of COVID-19 in the United States of America: Technical Report

Brennan, Darragh (2021) The effect of the climate on the spread of COVID-19 in the United States of America: Technical Report. Undergraduate thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

This report provides an analysis and evaluation on the effect of the climate on the spread of the coronavirus in the United States of America. The main datasets that were used for this analysis were “United States COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by State over time” (Data.Gov,2020), and a weather dataset that was found on the NOAA website (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,2020). By analysing these datasets this report attempts to answer the question “Does the climate have a direct effect on the spread of COVID-19 in the United States of America?”.

Methods of analysis include data pre-processing in Excel, cluster analysis, interactive maps, linear regression, and normality tests in RStudio, various non-parametric tests in SPSS and graphs and plots that were created in Tableau. The results of the mentioned analysis methods can be found throughout this report.

The results of the analysis methods show that initially it did appear that the hotter the climate was the more contagious the COVID-19 virus was but after further investigation and as more data was gathered and analysed it then appeared not to be the case and that the virus was actually more contagious the colder the climate was. The report concludes that with the current amount of available data the climate alone does not appear to have a direct impact on the spread of the virus in the USA however more data would be required to give a definite answer.

The report also investigates the fact that the analysis conducted does have limitations. This analysis solely looks at the cases and deaths in each state by month and then looks at the average temperature of the given month in each state. This limits the report as population, population density, vaccine rates or any other factors are not considered in this analysis and because COVID-19 spreads by close contact there is more likely other factors that impact the spread of the virus more than climate. The fact the dataset only began recording data from January 2020 also limits this study as predictions and conclusions are more difficult to make which makes it more difficult to answer the research question as there is no real historic data to analyse.

Item Type:	Thesis (Undergraduate)
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Electronic computers. Computer science R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Divisions:	School of Computing > Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Technology Management
Depositing User:	Clara Chan
Date Deposited:	17 Sep 2021 14:11
Last Modified:	17 Sep 2021 14:11
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/5057

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