BW #59: Long covid

In December 2019, I took my son to Beijing and Xi'an (China) for a one-week trip. We had a great time, seeing famous sites and generally having fun. We even saw the Chinese New Year decorations below trees in downtown Xi'an, waiting to be put up. Toward the end of our trip, I read about people in Wuhan who were sick with a new illness. I remember thinking how happy I was not to be in Wuhan.

Of course, the New Year decorations we saw in Xi'an were never put up, because the celebrations were canceled all over China. And soon after we returned home (on January 1st, 2020), the bad news in China turned into bad news for the entire world. People everywhere started to get sick and die from this illness, which was eventually called covid-19. Exactly four years ago, in March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared covid-19 to be a pandemic.

Countless articles and books have been written about covid-19, and the numerous effects it had on our lives. From international supply chains to education, from the expansion of work-from-home to government subsidies, the pandemic still reverberates through our lives. (Check out Felix Salmon's book "The Phoenix Economy" for a review of how many aspects of the economy were, and still are, affected.)

Even with vaccinations, medications, and treatments, covid-19 isn't gone. However, it does seem to be much more under control. This is true not just for acute covid, but also for what's known as "Long covid," a set of symptoms that affected people who were sick with covid-19 and have long-term medical issues as a result.

How common is long covid? How long does it last? Who is affected by it, and in what ways?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been surveying people regularly about long covid, in an attempt to understand and treat it better. This is known as a "pulse survey," because it's taking the pulse of an issue between official, formal Census Bureau surveys. It's described in full here:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm

This week, we'll look at the current state of long covid as described in the CDC's survey results.

Data and five questions

I'm on vacation this week (more on that in the next edition of Bamboo Weekly), so I'm going to give you only five questions. The learning goals include grouping, pivot tables, plotting, and working with multi-indexes.

I should be back tomorrow with the solutions, but they might be delayed a bit due to my vacation schedule.

The questions are all be based on the data that you can download from the CDC, from this link:

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Post-COVID-Conditions/gsea-w83j/about_data

Click on the "export" button at the top right of the page to get a CSV file with the latest pulse survey results. The above URL also serves as a data dictionary, albeit one with limited descriptions.

• Import the CSV file into a data frame. Ensure that "Time Period Start Date" and "Time Period End Date" are both treated as datetime values. Also, the index should consist of the columns "Phase", "Group", and "Subgroup".
• Create a line graph showing, at the national ("United States") level, the percentage of all adults who had each indicator. The x axis should reflect the phases of the study, and the y axis should reflect the percentage reporting each indicator. Each line should reflect a different indicator.