Lessons From China’s COVID-19 Visualizations

And interview with three data viz practitioners who have responded to the urgent need for communicating information about the coronavirus pandemic in China

The threat of the coronavirus has frightened people around the world. Disentangling the real and imagined from the threat can be especially difficult. In late February the general director of the WHO warned “it is impossible to predict which direction this epidemic will take.” Getting information to people about the state of the epidemic is especially important, yet often poorly done. We face what the WHO has termed an “infodemic,” where rumors and misinformation confuse citizens. People looking to understand real threats are often faced with inadequate visualizations.

Responding to this need in China, visualizers in traditional media and academia responded. Three different approaches to this challenge can be seen in the works of the following three visualization practitioners, who I interviewed for this story.

• Xiaoru Yuan (XR) is a professor at Peking University and leads the Peking University Visual Analytics group, which created many COVID-19 visualizations.
• Huang Zhiming (HZ) is the CEO of Data-viz.cn whose coronavirus visualizations in mass media have received over 1 billion views.
• Xiang Fan (XF) is a designer, digital media researcher, and professor at Tsinghua University…