CUHK Research: Changing the world

Identifying COVID-19 risks over space and time Returning to her alma mater CUHK in 2019 after a fruitful research career in the United States spanning three decades, Professor Kwan Mei-po has continued to break new grounds with GIS technology. One of her first projects at the University was to use GIS methods to identify high-risk areas and vulnerable groups in the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Kwan notes that the COVID-19 transmission in Hong Kong was driven by superspreading events at the early stage, such as a hot-pot family gathering, or a dance cluster. “Using innovative GIS spatial analysis methods and plotting activity data of each infected person on the map, we found these superspreading events tended to happen in a small number of places. These places usually are dotted with dense, old buildings and are mostly inhabited by old people. “More importantly, we found that 70% to 80% of local COVID-19 cases were concentrated in these few places in the first few waves of the pandemic. The new knowledge can complement the government’s methods in tracing the virus and help policymakers more promptly design effective place-based control measures for reducing transmission risk,” she says. For instance, the government can advise people to avoid visiting high-risk areas and undertaking high-risk activities before the viruses continue to spread. “The methodology and the spatial-temporal perspective would be useful for building pandemic readiness for the future,” she says. Feminist perspectives Professor Kwan is recognised for her transformative contributions to geography. In awarding her the Wilbanks Prize for Transformational Research in Geography in 2021, the American Association of Geographers remarked: “Employing feminist perspectives, Dr. Kwan has dramatically altered geo-visualization, the inclusion of qualitative data through geo-narratives, and she has broadened geographic information science beyond a narrow ‘objective’ standard to more humanistic standards that include perceptions, emotions, and behaviour as core concerns.” “People used to think GIS was only about plotting numerical values on the map, like air pollution, and that’s all. But I said no - we are able to combine GIS with qualitative analysis, even to visualise feelings and emotions,” Professor Kwan says. In one of her major projects in the United States, funded by the US National Institutes of Health, Professor Kwan used GIS data, spatial statistics and interactive mapping to identify HIV concentration hotspots in Tijuana, a city at the US-Mexican border plagued by the violence of drug cartels and the sex trade. In her field work, she collected and mapped the narratives of female sex workers Weareable tocombineGIS withqualitativeanalysis, even tovisualise feelings andemotions. 58