Use R and Tidycensus to Look at COVID-19 Risk Factors

The US Census Bureau Has Tons of Data to Help You Focus Your Efforts Against the Pandemic in the United States

I am liking the Tidycensus package by Kyle Walker more and more since I started using it last month to look at some COVID-19 risk factors in Fairfax County. In this blog post, I will quickly take you through some steps on downloading data straight from the US Census and putting those data on a map to help you decide on where to focus your efforts against one of the risk factors of COVID-19: Overcrowding.

Overcrowding is defined in this case as more than one person per room in a household. As I’m sure you can imagine, overcrowding can be a risk factor for becoming infected with the novel coronavirus (NCoV-2) and developing COVID-19 (the disease the virus causes). Hispanic communities across the United States tend to live in more crowded housing because of economic, social and cultural reasons. So let’s go ahead and make a quick choropleth map of overcrowding by census tract in Fairfax County and see if there are any areas in particular where maybe you’d like to do some sort of public health intervention to prevent or reduce the impact of the pandemic.