Exploring relationship between COVID-19 cases and eating habits using data of London boroughs

COVID-19 has affected everyone in the world in one way or another. At the time of this writing, there are approximately 110.9 million reported cases with approximately 2.4 million deaths across the world this makes the ratio of deaths to total infections a little over 2%. To better understand the reasons for COVID-19 related infections and deaths, efforts are underway to uncover relationships between them and existing health conditions. Some studies have focused on causes of infection and use of preventive equipment for protection, while others have focused on identifying relationships between deaths and existing diabetes, heart condition or hyper-tension. Research has established that pre-existing health conditions can be associated to eating habits of people. Therefore, we have tried to determine if there is any relationship between eating habits of people and COVID-19 infections. This has been done by making use of data related to purchases made by residents from Tesco supermarket, for London Boroughs. The data related to pre-existing health conditions, for same regions, was obtained from the London Datastore. Our study indicates that for the London Boroughs' data, food products containing alcohol, carbohydrates and fats are weakly correlated with the number of COVID-19 cases. We believe that these results warrant a more detailed investigation of causality.