Hongji Dai (left) is a former post-doc research fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health who worked under the supervision of Professor Jiali Han from 2014-2016.
Today, Dai is a senior epidemiologist, doing scientific research in a large cancer hospital in Tianjin, a city with more than 15 million residents in China.
“My daily work includes compiling data from biological samples and clinical tests from cancer patients, curating and exploring these data via visualization and statistical analysis,” Dai said. “I am always excited about the novel findings from these works, and believe science can make the world better tomorrow than it is today.”
On January 29, 2020, Dai was told to return to work after a five-day holiday celebrating the Chinese Lunar New Year.
“Earlier that month, I heard an emerging infectious disease outbreak in Wuhan, 710 miles from Tianjin. As an epidemiologist, I realized this could be another epidemic after SARS in 2003.”
Together with her best friend, Xi Zhang (right), also an alumna of the Fairbanks School of Public Health, they kept their eyes on daily confirmed cases reported by both the National Health Commission and World Health Organization.
As of March 4, 2020, the total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 climbed to approximately 80,000, with more than 3,000 reported deaths in China. Approximately 670,000 people had been identified as close contacts of infected patients, and 32,870 people had been under medical observation or quarantine in China.
“After the lockdown of Wuhan on January 23, 2020, many residential communities in most cities have been under strict scrutiny, including temperature check and residential permit check at entrances and exits,” Dai said. “We felt this epidemic may be more severe than the SARS outbreak in 2003, when Xi and I were both college students.”
Dai and Zhang decided to glean data from various sources and try to investigate whether COVID-19 and SARS exhibited similar spatial and temporal features at the provincial level in mainland China.
“With help from our workmates, we could finally depict the transmission patterns of these two diseases and found different spatiotemporal clustering patterns between COVID-19 and SARS,” said Dai, who is excited about sharing the results with anyone interested.
“We hope every student and teacher of public health could be involved in working to combat the possible once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, as well as stay safe and healthy. We would like to show our respect and gratitude to all the health workers who are at the front lines of the outbreak response and fighting against COVID-19.”
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