Interest Statement

My interest in this data comes from being a participant in the University of Michigan Law School’s Problem Solving Initiative during this Fall 2020 semester. My group has been asked to produce a policy memo on an impending COVID-19 vaccine. More narrowly, we are looking at promoting vaccine compliance in university settings. As such, I have chosen the following two data sets from the NYT. The first is a data set on mask wearing habits. Part of our analysis will look at public perception. This data may show some insight to COVID-related sentiment, by seeing how people have responded to a mask mandate. The second data set shows COVID case count by university. I have narrowed both data sets to focus in on the state of Michigan.

1. R Markdown

Here you will find visual representations of data on mask wearing habits from a survey conducted by the New York Times between July 2 and July 14, 2020. The original data sets can be found at: https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.

1.1 Frequency of Categorical Responses to the question “How often do you wear a mask in public when you expect to be within six feet of another person?”

1.2 Isolated Counties Plot

In this graph you can pick out the differences in mask-wearing habits in Hillsdale, Jackson, Livingston, Washtenaw, and Wayne counties set against the rest of Michigan. I chose these five counties in attempts to look at a potentially wide-range of behaviors, as these counties vary in sociodemographic characteristics which may influence mask wearing habits.

1.3 Interactive Plot

Scroll over data points to get even more information!

2. Maps

Here we switch to the NYT college & university level data (updated almost daily) which can be found here: https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/tree/master/colleges

2.1 QGIS

2.2 Tableau

3. Esquisse (R)

Lastly, we visualize the college level data back in R using Esquisse. Thank you for visiting my site!