boyquotes / visualize-covid-19

Investigating the economic and political implications of COVID-19

The political and economic perspective of COVID-19

Countries around the world are taking drastic measures to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus and its associated disease, COVID-19. This project looks at the stock market, the political system and news around the virus to get an idea on how the situation will evolve.

If you're interested in the current findings, you can check out this blog post on Medium (publishing date: March 17, 2020).

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Project Motivation
• File Description
• Results
• Licensing, Authors, Acknowledgements

Installation

The code requires Python versions of 3.* and general libraries available through the Anaconda package.

Project Motivation

It seems our lives are coming to a halt and changing dramatically amid measures to decrease the spread of the virus and 'flatten the curve'. And these restrictions are taking a toll on our economy and significantly influencing politics. This project takes a look at some graphs to describe what has already happened to the economy and politics (particularly in the US) and what this may mean for the future. Remember, there is a presidential election coming up in November of this year in the United States.

File Description

This projects includes one Jupyter notebook with all code required for analyzing the data.

Results

For a detailed overview of results, you can check out this Medium post. In short, I found the following things interesting:

1. News: the topics discussed on TV news channels and in digital outlets and newspapers in the United States have shifted from heavily covering the Democratic presidential primary election to covering the coronavirus outbreak. Particularly Trump's handling of the situation has come under scrutiny and is heavily debated.
2. Economy: stocks have entered a bear market and continue to drop. Looking at the past 35 years, the S&P 500 had its second and third worst days on March 16th and March 12th of this year (only Black Monday in 1987 was worse). The data as well as economists suggest that we are headed into a recession, the dimensions of which are yet to be seen.
3. Politics: local, state, congressional and presidential elections are happening this November in the US, however, election campaigns are taking a step back amid the outbreak with campaigns rallies being canceled, TV debates being held without an audience and some primaries being reschuled. The center of attention is shifting away from the elections and towards the virus and its economic effects. While Trump has been criticized for his handling of the situation and it is difficult for an incumbent to win a presidential election amid an economic downturn, today's environment of social media, fake news and partisan divides shouldn't be underestimated when it comes to Trump's chances to remain or leave the White House.

Licensing, Authors, Acknowledgements

The data used for the analysis comes from:

• Financial data: Yahoo Finance
• Coronavirus cases: Johns Hopkins University
• News: Media Cloud and The GDELT Project
• Politics: FiveThirtyEight and FiveThirtyEight

Feel free to use the code as you please and play around with it.