Compared with many other nations, the Taiwanese government has reacted with admirable speed and efficiency to the outbreak of a new coronavirus in China, starting with the establishment on Jan. 20 of a Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), before the nation began a week-long break for the Lunar New Year holiday.
It also pushed through the Special Act on COVID-19 Prevention, Relief and Restoration (嚴重特殊傳染性肺炎防治及紓困振興特別條例) in record time: The bill was submitted to the legislature on Thursday last week, lawmakers approved it on Tuesday and President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) signed it just hours later.
One key reason might be that the people in the nation’s top three posts — Tsai, Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) and Vice President Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) — were all members of the former Democratic Progressive Party administration during the SARS outbreak in 2003, with Chen, an epidemiologist by training, serving as minister of health, and were quick to recognize that a crisis was developing.
Yet like many other governments, Taiwan was caught unprepared by the immediate and widespread public demand for masks and disinfectants, forcing it to step in not only to help produce masks, but to implement a rationing system.
However, the government’s commitment to the free flow of information, with daily CECC news conferences and social media posts, has helped keep the public informed about the spread of the virus, travel alerts, entry restrictions and new policy measures — a sharp contrast to Beijing’s efforts to restrict access to information and the use of Chinese Communist Party propaganda departments to focus coverage on uplifting stories and stress that the party’s leaders have everything under control.
Beijing has also tried to shape the same narrative internationally, spoon-feeding data to an increasingly tame WHO, leading Xinhua news agency on Monday to trumpet that a 25-member WHO team on a nine-day tour of the country had hailed China for playing “a critical role in protecting the international community, buying precious time for countries to adopt active prevention and control measures, and providing them with worthwhile experience.”
Famed Chinese epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan (鍾南山) even told a news conference this week that the virus had peaked in China and the outbreak should be under control by April, before suggesting that it might not have originated in China after all.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Commissioner in Hong Kong Xie Feng (謝鋒), in an opinion piece published yesterday in the New York Times, continued to promote this pretense, writing that Beijing “has kept the public informed with daily updates, and has solicited the people’s suggestions and complaints via the Internet and social media platforms,” adding that “it has been highly responsive to public opinion.”
That is certainly not the view of many people in or outside China, or of the South China Morning Post team, who on Thursday published a special investigative report into the outbreak, titled “How Disease X, the epidemic-in-waiting, erupted in China.”
The CECC’s efforts have not always been smooth, and there are lessons that can be learned, for future crises or to be implemented now.
The daily press briefings are admirable, but have sometimes created more confusion, as policy measures are announced in broad strokes, with details left to be worked out later.
The announcements on mask rationing, paid parental leave, the closing of a class or a school if a student is confirmed to have COVID-19 and a temporary ban on medical personnel traveling abroad raised more questions than answers — especially among local government officials who have to comply with the evolving measures.
It has also not helped that the answers to some of those questions have also changed daily. There is truth to the maxim that the devil is in the details.
It might be worth taking an extra day, or two, to work out all the details before announcing something as drastic as a travel ban for doctors and nurses, or starting consultations earlier with groups organizing major sports events or pilgrimages.
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