Project: US State Vaccinations and Political Affiliations
In the past year, the world came to a standstill. The COVID-19 virus has affected so many lives and is still present in society. However, we are moving back towards what we would consider "normal life". The COVID-19 vaccine has become more widely available in the US and restrictions are starting to be lifted. Data science students became interested in looking at vaccination data sets. Questions that arose from this is if vaccination rates are different in certain states due to political affiliations, like whether the state leans red (Republican/conservative) or blue (Democrat/liberal). That is what we aim to determine in this first project.
Throughout the course of our first project we utilized data science tools/packages to analyze data sets dealing with COVID-19 vaccination rates in the US and each state's political affiliation (based on the 2016 presidential election). The analysis helped us answer our question of whether political affiliations have anything to do with vaccination rates. From our specific data sets we concluded yes there is a correlation or relationship between these two variables. Hypothesis tests we performed concluded that blue states will tend to have significantly higher max number of vaccinations long term over red states. This was also seen as the case for the time of maximum increase variable. However, the max number of vaccinations long term is our most important variable to look at to answer our question of interest. These results rather make sense since most red states were more lenient with restrictions and have not reacted well to the COVID-19 pandemic in general. One thing to note is this is just one data set and probably an over generalization, but definitely is important to think about either way.