Is it Helpful to Compare Taiwan’s COVID-19 Situation to the US?

Milo Hsieh contributed to this article.

In recent days Taiwan is experiencing its first large-scale community transmission outbreak of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China in late 2019.

For five straight days, the number of newly diagnosed cases in Taiwan broke records, and the country is in a state of quasi-lockdown as the national Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) imposes the strictest restrictions on the movement of peoples. Local governments scramble to shut down schools, libraries, and other public venues.

This is all new to Taiwan; understandably, a sense of panic and fear looms over everyone’s heads here. Social media activity calling for calm and order is juxtaposed with images of ramen being sold out at convenience stores. Working professionals in many sectors are still required to show up for work, despite government mandates having shut down bars and late-night shrimp fishing.

Meanwhile, those of us who have been living abroad have seen a lot worse. Well-intended efforts to calm people down cite the plight of the United States: “we had 16,000 cases yesterday, and we’re throwing away our masks! Don’t be paranoid!”

While comparing Taiwan to the United States offers some perspective, it should not be an excuse to make light of Taiwan’s own circumstances.

As of yesterday, there have been 32,940,846 cases and 585,970 deaths in the United States, roughly the equivalent of 2.35 million cases and 42,000 deaths in Taiwan. Meanwhile, Taiwan has had 2,017 total cases (including imported cases) and 12 deaths (not including the data on May 18, 2021).

While the raw numbers still look very promising for Taiwan in comparison, we should not forget that the US is in a stable, slightly downward trend, while numbers in Taiwan are climbing up quickly. Below is a logarithmic graph of daily new cases comparing the US and Taiwan:

Logarithmic graph of daily new cases per million people in Taiwan and the US (Our World Data, CC BY)

Not only is the trend in the past week much more serious for Taiwan than for the US, but Taiwan has relied on stringent contact tracing and quarantining, which requires a low enough number of new daily cases to make tracking humanly possible.

Since day one, Taiwan has taken a completely different path of pandemic prevention and management from the US. Taiwan was able to stay ahead of the virus, and conduct contact tracing with the level of tracking through mobile devices and national healthcare IDs (although not without its privacy and civil rights concerns).

The Taiwanese public’s high level of trust and closeness with the government allowed both sides to work together; the public readily complies with government measures, and therefore the government is confident and clear in creating its guidelines.

The United States, on the other hand, is almost the complete opposite. The threat of the virus was not taken seriously until hospitals were overwhelmed; the decentralized nature of American governance between federal, state, and municipal levels only caused confusion, not to mention having to navigate layers of private medical and insurance systems. Trust between the public, the government, scientific experts, and mainstream sources of information have been dire in the US.

If daily cases can be “flattened” at a level that still makes contact tracing possible, Taiwan can still avoid the entrenched mass lockdowns we’ve seen everywhere else.

Fundamentally, the psychological expectations are different in Taiwan and the US. Americans are just coming out of a traumatic year, and many of us have lost loved ones to COVID-19. Taiwan has been able to defend against that so far, and even thrive as a much-admired model around the world. In a sense, the stakes are even higher in Taiwan right now.

The Taiwanese public, including every individual, is grappling with how to calibrate expectations and personal responsibility right now—how to stay calm without underestimating the severity of the situation, as well as how to stay vigilant without giving in to mass hysteria.

Benchmarking Taiwan’s situation is useful as long as the perspective we gain ultimately helps us manage our expectations to keep ourselves and the public safe. But it is also important to be aware of the differences between the case of Taiwan and the case of the US.

As I’ve tweeted, if Taiwan as a whole, the people and the authorities working together, can keep the pandemic at bay over a year, then it can also get through this outbreak.

(Feature photo from @MOFA_Taiwan)