Did COVID Clip Our Wings?
COVID-19 Travel Impact Analysis
Python
Pandas
Data Cleaning
Time-Series Analysis
The Problem: How did international travel to and from the U.S. change as COVID-19 cases rose and fell from 2020 to 2024, for both U.S. and foreign citizens?
My Role: I helped clean and merge the datasets and build the visualizations.
Process
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Combined WHO daily COVID-19 data with monthly U.S. international travel data from the Department of Commerce
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Filtered to U.S. data and converted 1,983 daily case records into monthly totals to match the travel data
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Renamed columns to match, merged the datasets, and built a cases-by-country heatmap, a travel vs. cases line chart, and a share-of-travel area chart
Result: U.S. citizens returned to international travel sooner than foreign visitors did. By 2024, total travel had passed 2019 levels, but the number of foreign citizens arriving in the U.S. was still below pre-COVID levels. Travel also tended to drop during major case waves, with changes often lagging behind the surges.
What I Learned: Careful data prep matters most when you're combining sources with different formats and time scales.