The goal of this project is to demonstrate how hard the pandemic hurts people’s well-being, in terms of the loss of lives and job opportunities.
Most current research works are focused on separate factors, such as the transmission condition of COVID 19 or the change of house market in different areas.
This project explores approaches to evaluate the overall impact by considering the impact of the pandemic as well the economic environment together.
- The COVID-19 spread condition provided by CDC (~2.4GB)
- The average house price around US at county level by Zillow
- The CPI data by U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS
- The unemployment data by U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS
We observed that the R0 value peaked across all states in Mar’20, but the state Unemployment Rates reached zeniths mostly in May’20, and the CPIs dropped to nadirs even until Jun’20.
Since Jun’20, we have seen that both CPIs and Unemployment Rates are recovering along with the R0 values stabilized.
We observed that the house prices were increasing MoM and not being impacted crucially by neither the COVID infection nor the policy controls.
Our models predicted the housing prices across different states with the highest average accuracy, and this could be driven by the straight MoM increase of housing price as mentioned in the last paragraph. The small prediction errors for housing prices are primarily from underestimation.
If we have more time for this project, we could develop our own algorithm to calculate R0 value. Also, we may develop the linear regression models by adding other variables, like monthly state level death rate and newly infectious rate as additional dependent variables