Chapter 1 Introduction

There is no doubt that the most popular topic in 2020 is Covid-19. According to NYTimes, the total number of confirmed patients is about 17 million up to today. However, the development of Covid-19 in the United States is not monotonous, there are many changes from March to December. Facing the unprecedented pandemic, we would like to do have a clear understanding of the current circumstances of Covid-19 in our areas, the evolution of the number of new cases and death, the efficacy of Covid-19 protection policies. To learn these, exploratory data analysis and visualization techniques can be leveraged.

In our project, our team want to make use of those toolkit we learned during the 5702 EDAV course, including tidyverse, ggplot2, d3, shiny, to conduct data analysis on the dataset about Covid-19, apart from giving audiences a general view of Covid-19 in the United States, in each state, we also focus on the study of the situation of the medical system (ICU, hospital beds), see the status of the medical system changes with time and with the evolution of the circumstance of Covid-19. Apart from analyzing the data itself, we also combine the pattern of data with the government policy and significant social events (stay at home order, shut down date, election day) to dive deeper into the root causes of the pattern.

Our project report can be a useful reference for readers to know better about Covid-19, how Covid-19 has influenced our medical system, and what policies, which approaches are more helpful to control Covid-19. We elaborate the data by visualization tools to make the data readable and leveraged interactive tool d3 to build an interactive dashboard to help readers have a better experience with our analysis results.