Why Does Taiwan Have So Few Covid Cases?

Question

I lived here for a couple of years and I thought the pandemic would hit pretty hard here eventually. But so far it hasn't. I'm really surprised because it's very densely populated, people don't social distance (e.g queues will have less than 1m gap, and rubbish day everyone basically moshes, and social distancing is not enforced) and life hasn't changed much here. Everyone wears masks and uses the checkin apps and a whole lot of other measures like that. But there's a large old population who live in some sort of retirement homes and there's a lot of public transport. And vaccination rate is exceeded by places like Singapore and Hong Kong, but no large outbreaks, or death spikes, like in other places. And also we're right across the water from mainland China so things are not really not different in terms of geography, urban planning culture (if anything is far less space here and everything's more crowded than in an average mainland City), and so on... The one big difference is the lockdown measures have been far less severe here, if there can be said to have been a lockdown at all. And while we closed the borders at some point there's been international flights and people coming and going as long as you have the proper paperwork basically throughout the entire duration. I'm so curious what the reasons might be and maybe it's something that other places can replicate.

tomohawk · Accepted Answer

Taiwan has a healthy distrust of the Chinese government, as they were burned during the SARS scare.
Their surveilance detected the covid outbreak early, and they were the first country to lock down, at the end of December, 2019. This is while the WHO and CCP were saying there was nothing to worry about. The CCP was already supressing the truth and arresting doctors who tried to spread the alarm.
They had a game plan ready to go that they had developed after the SARS scare, so they just ran that plan.
Even so, it took them until May 2020 to reach covid zero. They were the first country to do it.
This provides a best case scenario for lockdown and containment - an island nation that caught the problem before a general outbreak - and it still took 5 months.
Since then, they've had new cases from foreign travel.

AlchemistCamp · Answer

The government response was highly competent, it's a high trust society where people have mostly followed the regulations and many here, including me, remember the original SARS outbreak in 2002. The situation just isn't remotely similar to the highly politicized responses elsewhere in the world.I never doubted that the government knew what it was doing. The vice president was an epidemiologist! It's hard to emphasize how different this is from many western countries where politicians tend to be innumerate and come from legal or management backgrounds.

bitxbitxbitcoin · Answer

Mandatory quarantine of everybody coming in is the missing piece of the scenario.
Plus their extreme version of contact tracing and tracking does the trick.
Places like Singapore and Hong Kong aren’t as geographically isolated as Taiwan is so the mandatory quarantine actually works.

Why Does Taiwan Have So Few Covid Cases?

Mandatory quarantine of everybody coming in is the missing piece of the scenario.Plus their extreme version of contact tracing and tracking does the trick.Places like Singapore and Hong Kong aren’t as geographically isolated as Taiwan is so the mandatory quarantine actually works.

Mandatory quarantine of everybody coming in is the missing piece of the scenario.
Plus their extreme version of contact tracing and tracking does the trick.
Places like Singapore and Hong Kong aren’t as geographically isolated as Taiwan is so the mandatory quarantine actually works.