Ashvin Loghashankar

The Economic Indicators of Higher COVID-19 Vaccination Rates and Identifying Strategies to Get More People Vaccinated

Started Apr. 15, 2021

Abstract or project description

The project objective is to identify how COVID-19 vaccine rates in the United States impacts the economy. This will be done by looking at monthly trends within counties in the country. This involves "linking" datasets, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine rate datasets and other datasets, such as unemployment rates, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor. Linking these datasets creates a novel dataset which will give unique insights into the economic impact of having more people vaccinated. Additionally, to identify effective strategies to get more people vaccinated, Twitter activity of local-level and state-level health departments will be analyzed through Natural Language Processing. This will show the impact of Twitter presence on the sentiment of vaccines and will show if greater Twitter activity is highly associated with more vaccine rates in the area.