Throughout the year 2020 and beyond, the term Covid-19 has certainly become the most familiar term to our ears. It is astonishing when we think that back in 2019, hardly anyone has ever heard of the term Covid-19 or even knew what a Coronavirus is.

Before Covid-19 was drastically popularized however, we have been dealing with another deadly virus: The Influenza virus.

As our communities have gotten used to Covid-19 over time, we have started to hear assumptions such as the expansion of Covid-19 should slow down once we get to the Summer season, or Covid-19 is similar to the Flu. Clearly, there are assumptions that the Influenza virus and Covid-19 virus share some similarities.

We wondered if there are similarities between the groups of population most affected by these two viruses in terms of demographics. And that is how the Project CovFlu was born.

Our main driving questions that we wanted to answer through analyzing the data were:

• Which subgroups of the U.S. population are the most impacted by the Covid-19 virus?
• Which subgroups of the U.S. population are the most impacted by the Influenza virus?
• How do those two subgroups compare against each other?

In this Shiny dashboard application, we analyze the demographics of those two subgroups using Covid-19 cases dataset from 2020 and Influenza mortality dataset from 2019. We compare them in terms of the following dimensions:

• Age Groups
• Gender
• Race
• Sickness Cases (Covid-19 Only)
• Hospitalizations (Covid-19 Only)
• Deaths (Covid-19 and Influenza)

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 Response. COVID-19 Case Surveillance Public Data Access, Summary, and Limitations. (version date: December 31, 2020). Accessed January 18, 2021. https://data.cdc.gov/Case-Surveillance/COVID-19-Case-Surveillance-Public-Use-Data/vbim-akqf

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Monthly provisional counts of deaths by age group, sex, and race/ethnicity for select causes of death. (version date: December 17, 2020). Accessed January 18, 2021. https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Monthly-provisional-counts-of-deaths-by-age-group-/65mz-jvh5

Check out the app here