COVID-19 Flight Departures and States' COVID-19 Restrictions?
By Afia-Grace Harris and Ana Baide
The COVID pandemic has affected all aspects of our society, including flight availability. Through the COVID pandemic, states have made their COVID policies to decrease the spread of the disease. Some states like Texas and Florida have enforced minimum restrictions. In contrast, New York and California have implemented strict COVID mandates. The degree of severity of these mandates has affected the number of flight departers per state.
JFK airport in New York had the most significant decrease in flight departures from March 2020 to January 2021 with 9.88%. Due to New York's large population, it became a hot spot for COVID infections. Therefore, Governor Cuomo enforced strict COVID mandates to protect New York residents. HOU airport in Houston, however, had a minor decrease in the number of flight departers from March 2020 to January 2021 with 3.33%. Throughout the pandemic, the existence and precautious of COVID has become a political issue among Southern Republican states, leading to lenient mandates and policies regarding COVID; Texas is one of these states.
Our data matched our hypothesis: airports with more liberal lockdown rules such as HOU and MIA had minor flight departures decrease than COVID authoritarian states like New York.
As inexperienced individuals retrieving data from databases, we found it difficult to obtain usable data. The data from the database was unorganized and had many numbers on it. Luckily one partner is a Computer Science major and had more experience with data and was able to help to format the data where could find relevant data. We ended up shifting from analyzing platforms and using RStudio. Since one of the group members had experience with it, it was straightforward to clean the data and look at the essential columns. For example, we look at each airport's departures and filter by the number of times the airport had a reporter each month.
Link to the dashboard here.