Portfolio
Seasonal Influenza
Objective
Analyze flu trends in the United States in order to provide more accurate recommendations on how many workers to send to each state.
Problem
Staff agency must determine where and how many staff to send to each state in order to prepare hospitals for the upcoming flu season
Data
- Project Brief
- This Influenza Deaths l Source – CDC.
- U.S Population l Source – U.S Census Bureau
- Influenza Visit l Source – CDC
Techniques Applied
- Data Cleaning
- Data Transformation and Integration
- Excel: Pivot Tables, VLOOKUP, Power Point
- Data Profiling and Integrity
- Designing a Data Research Project
- Data Visualization and Storytelling (Tableau)
Tools
The Process
The data preparation phase
The project data sets were raw datasets obtained from the CDC and the US Census Bureau. These datasets had to be cleaned first and then merged into a single dataset for better workability. However, there were a couple of data limitations, the most notable being the high number of missing values in the extracted datasets.
The analysis phases
The main hypothesis in this project was that the number of hospitalizations depended not only on the size of the population, but also on the population density.
The results
The results Since it was possible to demonstrate a need for additional nurses and doctors to meet the great demand of patients, it was identified in which months of the year more medical personnel were needed. Taking into account the results of a corresponding investigation, it was possible to identify which states were the most risky, and which states would be advisable to send medical personnel to with priority
Geographical Analysis
The demand for additional medical personnel depends on the number of patients with flu symptoms who seek medical care. To estimate these numbers, I used the CDC's influenza guidelines, which predict the proportion of the population in a geographic region that will seek medical care for the flu.
- It is appreciated that the most vulnerable people are those who are over 65 years of age, and it can be observed within the states that have been most affected by influenza.
Trend Analysis
Influenza in the US has a definite seasonal pattern, but the peak months vary by geographic region.
The Results
The analysis for this project determined a series of important factors that must be prioritized in cases of public health emergencies. These factors included the dates and states with a high number of hospitalized patients, and it was also possible to determine after a thorough investigation and calculations made the type of patients that need a higher priority.
Recommendations
Extra health personnel will be necessary to combat the influenza season mainly in the months of January, February, March and December. It is recommended to send medical personnel to states with greater urgency such as Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, North Carolina and Alabama, in addition to the states with the highest population. It will be necessary to prioritize care for people over 65 years of age.