The hypothesis statement to be tested is that the number of deaths is not related to the number of Covid-19 cases in the fifteen states. Ho=number of cases #number of deaths. From the research findings, I fail to reject the result because in some states with a very high number of Covid-19 cases, the deaths were fewer as compared to other states that had fewer Covid-19 cases but with higher number of deaths.
One of the weaknesses of my study was that it lacked scientific thoroughness and generalization of results to a wider population given that I sampled only fifteen states. The confounding variable is people with Covid-19 may be dying from other illnesses and not necessarily from Covid-19. I would like to extrapolate data on New York and this is because it has the highest number of deaths and lower number of cases as compared to California with the highest number of cases.
Further work needs to be done for example to determine whether all the deaths caused by Covid-19 were reported as some people may die at home and the statistics fail to include them and also to find out whether other illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension and heart diseases caused the deaths reported. Research conducted shows that the deaths reported from Covid-19 underestimated the entire death count with five states with higher Covid-19 deaths reporting an increase of deaths from other illnesses such as Alzheimer diseases and diabetes (Woolf et al., 2020). This published study is in line with my results as the published findings tally with the findings from the fifteen states I sampled.
The conclusion I have drawn is that the number of Covid-19 cases reported are not related to the number of deaths as some states such as New York, Illinois had higher deaths and lower number of cases as compared to California with a higher number of cases but lower deaths recorded. If I were to start the study again, I would sample a larger number of states a minimum of 30 states. I would consider age, race, and gender when starting this project again. The reader should know that there may be more deaths caused by Covid-19 and not reported and therefore the numbers indicated in each state may not represent the actual case. The sample was extracted from a research done and reported number of Covid-19 and therefore not random. The sample only included fifteen states which only represents 30% of the total states and therefore not large enough.
Reference
Woolf, S. H., Chapman, D. A., Sabo, R. T., Weinberger, D. M., Hill, L., & Taylor, D. D. (2020). Excess deaths from COVID-19 and other causes, March-July 2020. Jama, 324(15), 1562-1564.
