He scoured the internet for reliable data, often consulting BNO News, a Dutch website publishing COVID-19 data from several nations in table form. “He’s a total whiz with Esri technology and dashboard development.”Īs cases began to multiply around the world, Dong struggled to keep up. “Ensheng and I were basically the two that started the dashboard, but he was really the mastermind behind it,” Gardner said in a podcast about the science behind the now-famous dashboard. “I wanted to see how large the dot was in my hometown and compare it to the dot in the epicenter of the breakout,” he said.Įnsheng's home city of Taiyuan is the capital and largest city of Shanxi province, with more than 4 million inhabitants. For the rest of January, he worked mostly by himself, driven by a desire to map the outbreak on Taiyuan. Soon after his meeting with Gardner, Dong gathered the data he needed to launch the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard. The Data Problemĭashboards are typically oriented around a map, with accompanying charts, graphs, or other visuals to contextualize map imagery. Media outlets, including The New York Times and CNN, featured Dong’s handiwork, a prelude to work that would focus on a much larger health crisis on the horizon. “I immediately jumped into the project and helped her visualize measles risk in a dashboard,” he said. He arrived on campus at Johns Hopkins a few months before his program was to start, to assist in a study Gardner was coauthoring on measles vulnerability in the US. When Dong first contacted Gardner about the possibility of pursuing a PhD at Johns Hopkins, she was particularly intrigued by his facility with GIS, a skill Dong had honed during an internship at Esri. While interning at the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, he helped the agency use GIS to collect health-related data. Instructions on the barrier included a map showing the extent of the lock down.Īfter completing his undergraduate work in China, Dong earned a master’s degree in geography and statistics at the University of Idaho. This street blockade in Shenzhen, China, marks an area that was quarantined. “It’s basically about the interaction of people with the built environment.” For Dong, the discipline allows him to explore ways to combine the objectivity of numeric data with the subjectivity of data visualization. “The emphasis is on civilization engineering,” Dong said. “That’s my plan.” Civilization Engineeringĭong, 30, studies systems engineering, a modernized approach to civil engineering for the complex, interconnected world. Gardner suggested that Dong use a geographic information system (GIS) to construct an online dashboard, a visualization tool that uses maps and data to monitor unfolding events.ĭong nodded. They discussed the emerging epidemic and decided it was worth a closer look. The following day, Dong met with his faculty adviser, Lauren Gardner, co-director of the school’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering. Suddenly, the coronavirus-for Dong-seemed that much closer. On January 20, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed in Washington state. That’s not exactly next door-it’s the same distance that separates New York City and Detroit-but Dong felt concerned for his family’s safety. Taiyuan, another provincial capital and Dong’s hometown, is 600 miles from Wuhan. Dong, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, was thousands of miles away from the outbreak’s epicenter, but he had studied epidemics and knew how fast they can spread. A new viral contagion, SARS-CoV-2, had begun to spread in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei Province. Less than a month into 2020, Ensheng Dong heard the news.
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