Analysis of the Effectiveness of Face-Coverings on the Death Rate of COVID-19 Using Machine Learning

The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 shocked humanity leading to the death of millions of people worldwide. To stave off the spread of the virus, the authorities in the US, employed different strategies including the mask mandate (MM) order issued by the states' governors. Although most of the previous studies pointed in the direction that MM can be effective in hindering the spread of viral infections, the effectiveness of MM in reducing the degree of exposure to the virus and, consequently, death rates remains indeterminate. Indeed, the extent to which the degree of exposure to COVID-19 takes part in the lethality of the virus remains unclear. In the current work, we defined a parameter called the average death ratio as the monthly average of the ratio of the number of daily deaths to the total number of daily cases. We utilized survey data provided by New York Times to quantify people's abidance to the MM order. Additionally, we implicitly addressed the extent to which people abide by the MM order that may depend on some parameters like population, income, and political inclination. Using different machine learning classification algorithms we investigated how the decrease or increase in death ratio for the counties in the US West Coast correlates with the input parameters. Our results showed a promising score as high as 0.94 with algorithms like XGBoost, Random Forest, and Naive Bayes. To verify the model, the best performing algorithms were then utilized to analyze other states (Arizona, New Jersey, New York and Texas) as test cases. The findings show an acceptable trend, further confirming usability of the chosen features for prediction of similar cases.