The Analysis of COVID-19 Physical and Mental Health Impacts in the United States Open Access

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic has been ongoing for about two years now, people around the globe have gradually adapted to the "new normal" of wearing masks, social distancing, quarantine and lockdowns. This project aims to explore the physical and mental health impacts of COVID-19 in the United States, and how they collectively impact the well-being of American people. To identify factors associated with physical health and vaccination progress, linear regressions were applied to state-level dataset comprising national COVID-19 vaccine completion rate and coronavirus-related mortality rate. We retrieved data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 2018 American Community Survey. What we found out is that Americans with underlying diabetes disease and those who have seen an increasing number of deaths and positive cases around them seem more likely to receive vaccines over time, and the three types of vaccines administered within the U.S. are playing a role in reducing the death and case numbers. In terms of psychological health, past studies have shown the significant mental and emotional impacts such as anxiety, depression, uncertainty and stigma brought by a global pandemic when the cause or progression of the disease and outcomes are unclear. In current study, the researchers analyzed Google Trends and national suicide rate data as two ways to measure the Americans' psychological stability during the pandemic. The result indicates that although the national suicide rate has decreased in year 2020 and the popularity of depression-related search terms haven't changed much, we can't easily draw conclusion that COVID-19 hasn't mentally impacted the Americans. There're many social movements happening at the same time with the COVID-19 outbreak, which could be important confounding variables. For future study, these variables need to be controlled in order to find out the real psychological fluctuation happened in the U.S.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.2 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 Data Description

2.1 Vaccination and Physical Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2.1.1 Data Source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2.1.2 Preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

2.2 Mental Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2.2.1 Data Source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

2.2.2 Preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

3 Vaccination and Physical Health

3.1 Study 1: Vaccination and Medical History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

3.1.1 Methods and Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

3.1.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

3.1.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

3.2 Study 2: Population’s Willingness to Be Vaccinated . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

3.2.1 Methods and Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

3.2.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

3.2.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

3.3 Study 3: Vaccination Progress and COVID Mortality . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

3.3.1 Methods and Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

3.3.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

3.3.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

4 Mental Health

4.1 Study 4: Google Search Trend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

4.1.1 Methods and Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

4.1.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

4.1.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

4.2 Study 5: Suicide Rate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

4.2.1 Methods and Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

4.2.2 Results and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

5 Conclusion

5.1 Limitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

5.2 Future Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Quantitative Science
Degree	B.S.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Statistics Psychology, Social Health Sciences, Epidemiology
Keyword	Theory
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Seunghwa Rho, Emory University
Committee Members	Shivani A. Patel, Emory University Jessica Barber, Emory University

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