As the scientific community struggles to understand the workings of COVID-19, the pandemic is being faced by countries worldwide.
One nation, Taiwan, has been able to stand on the front line, less than 100km from the east coast of China, from late December last year until now, with fewer than 400 confirmed cases and just six deaths.
The majority of the confirmed cases identified in Taiwan since late February were imported, while most of the cases were brought from China from late January to February.
Taiwan’s frontline defense has been extremely effective, making it a very safe country since the outbreak first began in Wuhan, China.
With more than half a million Taiwanese working in the epicenter of the pandemic, Taiwan’s early success in defending against the virus was incredible.
Many have wondered what magical strategies Taiwan employed, while global superpowers such as the US were not able to effectively ward off the virus.
A lack of trust in global health authorities such as the WHO, as well as China’s health authority helped Taiwan defend against the virus.
Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣中正) regime was expelled from the WHO from January 1972, and for decades, Taiwan was a name unheard in the global health world.
In 1998, enterovirus 71 spread across South Asia, eventually reaching Taiwan. The nation had more than 400 confirmed cases, resulting in 71 infant deaths.
Not a single piece of information was reported by the WHO with regard to the emerging casualties in Taiwan.
In the late 1990s, the Western Pacific WHO region sought to declare the whole region free of poliomyelitis, but the WHO had no understanding of the situation in Taiwan. With no polio cases reported since 1983, Taiwan’s success went unrecognized.
Taiwan called up an international committee of experts which was only able to make the ad hoc announcement in 2000.
The reality was that, since 1972, the WHO was not at all aware of the public health situation and disease prevalence in Taiwan, as China had failed to report on its so-called “rogue province island.”
The drama created by China in the WHO since the early 1970s and the propaganda pushed by Beijing in the UN and the WHO with regards to Taiwan’s representation was realized openly in the annual World Health Assembly from 1997.
Each year, Taiwanese health professionals and health authorities have asked allies to support Taiwan’s inclusion in high-level public health conferences.
Chinese delegates have viciously used any means possible to beat down each of these attempts its pretend that China has the right to present and to decide on Taiwan’s health affairs.
However, the arguments are mostly about political interests, instead of following the WHO constitution and the principle of “health of all.”
Taiwan learned another painful lesson in its fight against SARS. In late 2002, an unknown viral pneumonia spread from China’s Guangdong Province to Hong Kong and other destinations frequented by Chinese travelers.
Taiwan reported imported cases after the Lunar New Year in 2003. However, a few cases of SARS were missed entering Taiwan from China, resulting in massive community transmission.
It eventually led to a semi-lockdown of Taiwan, with more than 100,000 people being placed in quarantine for weeks.
When all the other countries — including China, Vietnam and Malaysia — made their way out of the SARS outbreak, Taiwan was left alone in its fight against SARS, without any assistance or information from the WHO, let alone from China.
Ten healthcare workers died after being infected as they treated SARS patients.
Taiwan’s healthcare system was given a tremendous wake-up call — many changes to the system occurred in the following years, which included setting up hospital patient safety measures, building negative-pressure wards throughout the country, implementing intensive training for healthcare workers and giving the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) new resources, such as access to community disease reporting from all clinics and hospitals simultaneously.
The CDC was equipped with decentralized reference laboratories, supported by an informatics-based national health insurance scheme.
The CDC also declared implementation of the WHO’s revised International Health Regulations (2005) in early 2006, one of the first to do this before all the WHO member states.
However, the WHO has continued to be blind to all of Taiwan’s efforts, and rejected donations worth millions of US dollars to fight the Ebola epidemic and for other health matters.
Taiwan was not simply lucky in battling COVID-19, as it was so close to the epicenter of outbreak, with many people traveling between Taiwan and China.
The only systemic magic Taiwan used in defeating the new coronavirus was due to the painful lessons it had learned, it failure to be recognized by the WHO and its mistreatment by China.
Taiwan learned in the past 20 years to safeguard its people and hospitals from negligence and “not to trust your enemy or the WHO.”
Peter Chang is a member of the Control Yuan.
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