HUD Crosswalk Files Facilitate Multi-State Census Tract COVID-19 Spatial Analysis

Abstract

The coronavirus COVID-19 has infected millions of Americans. Datasets like the national county-level aggregation of COVID-19 case counts that Johns Hopkins University & Medicine assembled have been widely used, but few analyses have been performed at the local level due to the low supply of data. Like many things American, the distribution of COVID-19 data varies due to differing state, county, and local government reporting policies. The result is a patchwork of COVID-19 data at the local level, mostly aggregated to ZIP Codes due to ease of data processing rather than census tracts which are a better geographical unit for analysis. Local level COVID-19 data are rare and often only available for small areas. In this article, we demonstrate how the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Crosswalk Files can be used to assemble a census tract-level dataset of COVID-19 case rates in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Statistical Area across multiple states.