COVID-19 It’s Spread, and Areas to Test in NYC
By: James Wilson-Schutter
Covid-19 is arguably the worst tragedy to have impacted the world in the 21st century. It’s a disease that can affect anyone, with a varying range of symptoms, and in its worst-case scenario, it can prove deadly. According to the CDC, some people are more likely to catch the illness and have severe symptoms, and some of these factors that determine the likeliness of severe symptoms are known as risk factors (CDC, 2020). Earlier in 2020, NYC was one of the deadliest areas of the country in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, but not all parts of the city have been impacted to the same extent by the virus. COVID-19 infections may have a very un-even distribution in the neighborhoods of New York City, but the risk factors provided by the CDC, which are said to determine the likelihood of people catching the disease may help in understanding and preventing it’s spread. New York City is facing an unprecedented risk due to COVID-19, with a large rise occurring recently and schools shutting down again, so it’s important to ask how and where we should maximize our testing, and which metrics are important to look at when testing (Shapiro, 2020).
Firstly, it’s important to define all of the risk factors as outlined by the CDC, with those being, age, race, gender, medical conditions, medication, income/poverty, occupations, and pregnancy. Out of all of these only two can truly be mapped, race and income, as medical conditions, occupations, gender, and pregnancy tend not to congregate or discriminate based on zip code. Another major risk factor comes in the form of age groups, however due to age groups being so spread out and diverse around the city, it’s almost impossible to account for everyone and measure this statistic without a massive margin of error. Most neighborhoods have a diverse group of ages and with few areas, let alone zip codes, showing any real data, unlike race and income, it makes age data too spread out to be accurately measured.
In order to properly map New York City, it’s first important to look at where COVID-19 has had the largest impact up to this point. By taking data provided by NYC Health, and graphing it onto zip codes in New York City, it’s easy to tell where COVID-19 has been transmitted the most. From looking at the data, it’s clear that northern Staten Island, most of the Bronx, a diverse area in Queens, and southern Brooklyn have all been impacted much more severely than other areas like northern Brooklyn, and most of Manhattan. However, this data doesn’t give any information about the side effects nor potential risk factors of the virus. Perhaps the most feared, morbid and shocking side effect of COVID-19, and why it’s labeled as a pandemic, is due to its death rate. There are certain areas (circled in black) which have a much higher death rate than they do case rate, and there are certain areas (circled in red) which have a higher case rate than they do death rate. It’s important to take the case rate picture with a grain of salt, however, even with its flaws, it’s the most valuable metric as it provides information on which areas are the most generally impacted by COVID-19 and which are the most susceptible.
While these maps provide us with concrete insight into where COVID is happening and where it’s effects are the most prominent, it doesn’t provide any background information about the zip codes that are shown in the images. When trying to compare areas, along with their risk factors, you can’t just take a one dimensional and singular view, i.e., where one would just test areas that currently have the most cases and have been the most affected. While that works at helping those areas, it doesn’t provide any measures to stop the spread of COVID throughout the city, instead of just minimizing it in a single area. Through measuring which neighborhoods are most in line with the CDC risk factors, as well as having had and experienced COVID, we can figure out which areas will be the most susceptible to COVID, and prevent the spread through rigorous testing, contact tracing and maintenance.
Perhaps the most notable statistic of a CDC risk factor impacting the lives of New Yorkers, is the death rate, with COVID killing, “black and Latino people in NEW YORK CITY at twice the rate that it is killing white people” (Mays & Newman, 2020). While the New York times reported that blacks and Latinos were dying at a faster rate, the CDC specifically mentions race as a risk factor, with the disease disproportionately killing minorities. Graphed below is a map of racial data, with the lighter the color indicating more white people, and the darker the color indicating fewer white people, and by analyzing the map, it seems as though there is a strong relation between color and COVID, with certain notable exceptions like parts of Staten Island, the Lower East Side, parts of Brooklyn, and the Bronx as well.
It’s shocking to see how correlated race and COVID-19 rates are, but something to keep in mind is that this isn’t the only risk factor. When being compared to the racial data, household income and poverty seem to have a much less dramatic relationship with COVID. There are some areas where poverty seems to correlate heavily with COVID-19, and others where there’s little, like southern Queens and the upper Bronx. Another stark example and contrast are that the poorest zip code on Staten Island is also the least affected by COVID-19 in relation to its neighbors on the island.
While these statistics and maps exhibiting COVID factors help to discern which risk factors are most important to the lives of New Yorkers, it’s clear that race is perhaps the best risk factor to use when determining which areas to test and to what degree you test those areas. While median income does help to determine what areas are more susceptible to COVID-19, the degree to which it helps is much less accurate than that of race. As unfortunate as it is, it’s a harsh reality that New Yorkers must face, that minority groups are much more severely impacted by COVID-19 than their counterparts (Mays & Newman, 2020). Going forward, NYC should be testing for COVID-19 in areas that have the highest number of minorities per capita, and to a lesser extent, those who are in low-income areas as well. The map below shows circled areas that may need more aggressive testing per capita in order to curb the spread through NYC.
Methodology:
For this project, I took data from NYC Health, and due to it being presented on a zip code basis, I graphed it onto a map of zip codes in NYC from 2018, provided by the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. After this, I graphed the death rate onto the same map of zip codes, which was also provided by NYC Health. The next step was to extract data from the five-year American Community Survey from 2018, which provided the information on race and income in a csv code format, using RStudio (link below). I then imported the data to QGIS, and from there graphed it onto the same zip code map previously used for both household income and race. All my work in QGIS was done through joining csvs to the same zip code shape file in order to ensure that the values remained consistent throughout, and the shape files could easily be compared. I did some work in post processing in order to compare the maps side by side, using Paint 3D, as well as inkscape. I also used my the color swatches available on https://colordesigner.io/ as I my taste in colors and eyes deceive me in that regard. As far as my code in R goes, it’s all fairly simply, as I just pulled data from the ACS (American community survey) and put those into csvs. I did however have to remove certain parts of the code so that it would transfer over, however this had no impact on the data itself, just on formatting. I started working on the project on the 14th of November, which was when I pulled the COVID data from NYC’s github.
Works Cited:
Assessing Risk Factors for Severe COVID-19 Illness. (2020). Retrieved November 20, 2020, from https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/assessing-risk-factors.html
Mays, J., & Newman, A. (2020, April 08). Virus Is Twice as Deadly for Black and Latino People Than Whites in N.Y.C. Retrieved November 23, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/nyregion/coronavirus-race-deaths.html