Today’s link is from Bloomberg News.
Why I think it’s worth sharing: OK, there’s a little pride at work here. My family roots are in Taiwan, whose pandemic response is held up in this article as the most successful one in the world.
This is a frustrating read, because I feel as if it highlights our failures here in America. Granted, some key cultural differences play a significant role — not just the Taiwanese experience with pandemics that the article points out, but also a long history of authoritarian regimes from colonization by the Japanese (1850-1944) to martial law under the Kuomintang Party (1949-1987). Oh, and Taiwan is a small island that’s far easier to lock down than our sprawling continent.
But this article can also be read in a hopeful way, as a primer that could still be useful to us if we could just get over our “don’t tell me what to do” mindset and adopt some of the tactics that have worked elsewhere.
Here’s the article, by Cindy Wang and Samson Ellis.
“Record 200 Days With No Local Case Makes Taiwan World’s Envy”