The Importance of Public Healthcare InfrastructureDuring theCOVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the course of history and the lives of every single person in this day and age. In its path of disruption and ruin, it has also brought to light that the healthcare infrastructures of every single country are not as prepared and well-equipped as they may seem, regardless of how developed and/or rich the quality of healthcare in a country is perceived to be. Utilizing classification and regression (C&R) decision trees and K-Means cluster analyses, this study hopes to identify potential trends and similarities between COVID-19 case and death statistics with various healthcare capacity metrics in two major US counties, Chicago’s Cook County in Illinois and Palm Beach County in Florida. With the data gathered by each county’s respective health care departments and other reputable third-party sources such as the New York Times, it was concluded that perhaps the most important healthcare metric for predicting COVID-19 cases and deaths would be the number of occupied ICU beds for COVID-19-related reasons in Cook County and the number of available hospital beds in Palm Beach County