Throwback to my undergrad days where my final project took me on a different kind of road trip! 🚗💨 We were on a mission to crack the code on whether hopping around your home state could give COVID-19 a free ride too.
Armed with spreadsheets and data sets—one tracking daily COVID stats per state and another logging those intrastate miles—we rolled up our sleeves to clean, merge, and analyze this mountain of information. Our focus? To see if there was a hidden link between the virus’s spread and how much people traveled within their state borders.
We plotted, we crunched numbers, and yes, we even dreamt in data points (nightmare material, for sure). But here's the twist: despite all the number-crunching wizardry and fancy predictive models, it turns out the virus didn’t hitchhike on these local trips as we thought it might.
So, what did we learn? Well, COVID-19 seemed to have its own itinerary, and intrastate travel wasn't its travel buddy. But the journey through data jungles and statistical savannas was a wild ride that I wouldn't trade for anything.
