Examining the Racial, Environmental, and Economic Influences on COVID-19 Mortality in Louisiana

Audience

This course module will be deployed Fall ‘22 as a major assignment that will be completed over several X-hours.

ENVS3 is a course for first or second year students, with little to some experience expected in math, statistics, and data science. 

Other applicable courses that may benefit from this module:

Potential for other ENVS, ECON, or QSS courses that are examining the interrelationship between social, economic, and environmental variables.

Project Summary

Primary Objective

Students will use spatial data to visualize human-environment relationships and analyze those relationships using a web-app which allows for data visualization, plotting, and linear regression analysis.

Goals

Students will generate hypotheses about what is driving COVID-19 mortality in Louisiana and then use a web-app to compare variables they think are important with spatial visualizations, a correlation matrix, and bivariate plots.

Content Outline

Module can be found here: https://envs3-app-yaex.onrender.com/

Web App

Interactive Map

• Layer different variables such as poverty rate, population, with covid deaths by waves

• Colored map with scaled bubbles

Correlation Matrix

• See how different variables correlate with covid deaths for each wave

Scatter Plot/Linear Regression

• Plot variables against each other and against COVID deaths

• Linear Regression best fit line and R^2 value can be turned on and off

Assignment

Required reading

• two papers for background knowledge, get acquainted with dataset

Short answer questions

• guide students through web app

• Focused on students making their own assumptions, and discovering the story that the data tells

Post Assignment Analysis

• Going over multiple regression results with students in class

For more information email: difuse-pi-group@dartmouth.edu