08 → EDA: covid wastewater x hospitalizations
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This project presents an innovative exploratory analysis that combines COVID-19 hospitalization rates with wastewater viral activity levels. While the CDC provides these datasets separately, this analysis integrates them to uncover hidden trends and correlations that may not be evident when viewed individually.
Project Objectives:
- Trend Analysis: Investigate the relationship between wastewater viral loads and hospitalization rates to identify early warning signals of outbreaks.
- Hypothesis Testing: Assess the hypothesis that increases in wastewater viral loads precede or coincide with spikes in hospital admissions.
- Public Health Insights: Provide actionable insights for health officials by leveraging wastewater surveillance as a predictive tool.
Why Wastewater Surveillance? Wastewater surveillance is a comprehensive and inclusive data source that captures virus presence across entire communities. Unlike traditional testing, it accounts for asymptomatic individuals and those who lack access to or avoid testing, offering an unbiased population-wide view of virus circulation.
Key Findings and Methodology:
- Data integration and visualization to observe patterns over time.
- Statistical comparison between hospitalization peaks and wastewater viral load fluctuations.
- Identification of potential predictive indicators to enhance pandemic response efforts.
This analysis demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary data integration in public health and highlights wastewater surveillance as a powerful tool for monitoring infectious disease trends at the community level.