An Examination of the Cost of COVID-19 in the United States
For my capstone project, I decided to analyze the econonomic and financial costs of COVID-19 in the US. The idea was to create a piece of data journalism. Through a series of 8 data visualizations, I created the pages of my data story. It even has a front and back cover along with an introduction and conclusion.
I started out broadly, showing the total number of deaths in the United States. I examined traditional economic measures like unemployment & GDP followed by the impact on schools & learning. Then I looked at economic opportunity costs, financial costs, government spending, and compared everything historically.
In terms of insights from my analysis, it's safe to say that COVID-19 has tolled a higher cost than anything the United States has ever dealt with in its history:
- The Economic Costs of COVID-19 are: 6.5 million jobs, $500.6 billion in lost 2020 GDP, 3,000,000 AWOL students with $72,000 in diminished lifetime earnings, and an estimated $16 trillion in future lost GDP and Health. The economic cost of lives lost so far is $5.52 trillion.
- The Financial Costs of COVID-19 are: $103 billion in hospital expenses, $700 billion in Adminstration spending, $2.9 trillion in Federal Reserve action, and $5.3 trillion in Legislative spending. Federal COVID spending amounts to more than $18,000/person in the United States.
- The US has never experienced anything that tolled such a high cost in economic or financial terms over such a short period of time in its history.
I chose this topic because COVID has cost America more than any other event or crisis in history. I believe telling a story with data visualizations is more powerful and impactful than any other format. I also have a major interest in Data Journalism and this project is designed to be a visual data story.
What is the Economic and Financial Cost of COVID-19 in the United States?
I produced this project in Tableau. I did some data cleaning in Excel and Python.
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