John J. Tkacik, Jr. On Taiwan: Taiwan’s place on the coronavirus mapSwirling within the cybersphere’s vast ocean of reports, statistics and graphs about the international coronavirus pandemic, there is a short sentence out there in the worldwide web, which the Chinese government doesn’t want people to notice. A Johns Hopkins engineering professor assembled the map’s dashboard, and a Chinese doctoral student, Ensheng Dong (董恩盛), took over as the map’s webmaster. The JHU map lumped Taiwan’s numbers together with China’s, and consequently buried some extremely important epidemiological data. State called JHU and, after a friendly conversation, “Taiwan*” was restored in all its ambiguous glory to the JHU map — with an asterisk. So, Messrs. Dong’s and Du’s vision of their JHU map database accessing Taiwan’s health data, together with Japan’s, Korea’s, Singapore’s, and Hong Kong’s, is not far-fetched.

Source: Taipei Times March 22, 2020 15:56 UTC