The Right Way to Respond to a COVID Outbreak
Taiwan’s rapid reaction prevented a catastrophe
I’m not typically in the habit of long rants but bear with me for a moment here. You may have heard that, after 16 months, Taiwan has experienced a COVID outbreak.
There are a lot of loud people on The Internets endlessly complaining that the Taiwan government has failed us: the government should have done better, they should have enacted different policies, they should have been more prepared for the inevitable. They should have adjusted sooner. They should have waited longer. They were too passive. They were too aggressive.
What they actually did
So actually, here’s what Taiwan has done, and continues to do: Taiwan has protected (and continues to protect) the overwhelming mass of the 23 million-plus population of this country from COVID since January of 2020. As of May 21, the country had experienced just 12 COVID deaths. That we here have gone 16 months in a splendidly idyllic cocoon of near-normalcy while the rest of the world slogs bravely but robotically through daily Zoom calls in their lunch-stained pajama pants from Sunday is nothing short of an absolute fucking marvel, the scope of which is not diminished whatsoever by recent events.
In the past four weeks, Taiwan has continued to deliver us regular, fact-based, real-time information on the current national COVID status. We have plenty of surgical masks, widely available to the public in every single corner convenience store, for pennies. We have new apps that alert you if you’ve been near a COVID cluster case, but do not infringe on your personal privacy. Within two days of the outbreak, every store had a QR code (like the one pictured below) on the door helping customers to send a required text message to the Taiwan CDC before entering for contact tracing in the future. We have, *within 48 hours* of school closure announcements, a whole country of schoolchildren who have gone, bumpily, to be sure, but relatively quickly, to online learning. We have an entire country of people cooperating. We have a mayor in Taipei who regularly, publicly espouses the conviction that people will continue to do the right thing.
What happens when people cooperate
And mostly, we do. People stay home. There are stories of communities organizing shopping days to reduce the number of people at supermarkets, going above and beyond what the government has asked. People sanitize their hands. People wear masks. EVERYWHERE. There are no fringe idiots at the roadside shouting about their God-given right to be a self-centered, self-important, maskless mouth-breathing douchebag. People are calm, understanding, and patient. We have the benefit of seeing the world’s experience, if you can call that a benefit. And we’re trying to deploy it as best we can.
This outbreak happened suddenly, probably because of a pilot who went out during his three day quarantine. The speed of the government’s reaction is now bearing fruit. After two weeks of a soft lockdown, the case numbers started dropping. The rate of transmission (Rt) went from a high of 15 on May 13 to 1.02 on May 30th and the outbreak is considered controllable. In just two short weeks of fairly minor sacrifices and following expert opinion, the government has hopefully managed to contain an outbreak in a dense urban context of 7 million people.
And this, all of this, is how I know that the government of Taiwan has not, in fact, failed us. On the contrary, the government of Taiwan, democratically elected by the *people* of Taiwan, is the only reason we have been so lucky so far. That same government has fought to buy enough doses of vaccine despite maneuvering by China to block those purchases. Its transgender non-binary Digital Minister Audrey Tang has quickly deployed an online system to enable people to sign up for vaccination. Taiwanese people chose the right leadership to represent their spirit of shared community, collective compliance, willingness to help others, steadfast belief in science and facts, and their indomitable, often maddening zeal for following rules to the absolute letter.
I’ve never been prouder to call this place my home.
