Elementary Statistics Projects Using Covid Data

This article describes five elementary statistics projects involving the Covid-19 data made available to the public in csv files by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first project examined data available at the beginning of the covid surge in New York City in spring, 2020, and used the correlation coefficient to estimate the total number of deaths that could be expected as the spike ran its course. The second project is an easy one on the concept of excess deaths and on the mechanics of extracting parts of a data file that answer relevant questions. The data is from a spike in deaths in the particularly bad flu surge in the winter of 2017–2018. The third and fourth projects ask the student to fit a logistic growth curve to observed cumulative numbers of deaths in a spike, like the Covid spikes in New York City and Wisconsin and the nationwide 2017–2018 flu spike. The method is a simple linear regression with transformed variables. The fifth project involves hypothesis testing and judging when a Poisson model might be useful. The paper also documents difficulties and adaptations of the sort familiar to all teachers who have taught during the Covid-19 pandemic.