Will doctors mistake COVID as regular Flu disease?
Theme: Health, Covid, Flu
Description:
To find out if doctors mistake COVID as regular Flu disease, I will use compare previous years of Flu cases with 2019-2020 year of Flu cases to figure if the number of Flu cases are normal or not, then we can conclude if doctors mistake COVID as regular Flu disease.
Data:
To find out if the first case of the COVID happened in NYC a long time before the official announcement of the first case of COVID happened in NYC or government covered it up with Flu cases. I will compare previous years of Flu cases with 2019-2020 year of Flu cases from Health Data Ner York (New York Open Data) to figure the answer.
Techniques and hypnosis:
My hypnosis for this topic is the Flu cases in the United States during the year 2019-2020 is higher than other years. To reach this answer, i used python pandas and pandasql to gather the information from the csv file from health.data.ny.gov, then i extract the data for each season and use matplotlib to make the graph.
Total Flu cases in the United States
However, I discovered an interesting fact, in the year of 2020-2021, the number of Flu cases are extremely low, may be because people are going out less and wearing mask.
Total unspecified cases in the United States
When we talk about unspecified cases, we mean the cases that are "Flu like" cases and can't identify the type, or cases that didn't record the type by the doctor. Those unspecified cases can be any "Flu like" cases but not actually Flu cases. Therefore, we can question some of unspecified cases in the year 2019-2020 to be COVID cases as well.
Moreover, let's zoom in to the New York City Flu cases count, we can see in the year of 2019-2020, where Covid first discovered, has the largest peak of the Flu cases, which is not usual. Flu cases from other years are most likely near 1000 cases, and cases in the year of 2019-2020 doubled its amount.
Total Flu cases in the New York City
From the graph we can tell the number of cases during 2019-2020 is higher comparing to other years. The graph satisfies my hypnosis, Flu cases in the United States during the year 2019-2020 is higher than other years, which can lead to a result, there might be a chance that a doctor mistaken COVID cases as regular Flu cases. However, Flu cases itself still not enough to conclude that doctors mistake COVID as regular Flu disease, there might be some other variables to affect the result. On the other hand, before the discovery of COVID cases, doctors don't know the behavior of the new virus is. Therefore, doctors will use their previous life experience to diagnose patients, which might lead to the wrong diagnose, and mistake COVID as regular Flu disease.
Data Sources and Citation:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
https://health.data.ny.gov/Health/Influenza-Laboratory-Confirmed-Cases-By-County-Beg/jr8b-6gh6/data
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