Covid: An Alternative Reality From Another Tea-Drinking Island Nation
Part 2: Covid in Taiwan or The Hundred And Twenty Four Points
My wife is from Taiwan, we still have family there, and one of our daughters happened to be studying in Taipei when the pandemic broke, so I’ve been following the response there with particular interest. And growing awe and envy. Taiwan’s handling of Covid rarely gets a mention in our media, and hardly ever in much detail, yet its results are so spectacular I’m finding it hard to understand why.
So, in a spirit of scientific enquiry, let’s compare notes with Taiwan, our fellow tea-drinking island nation, whose nearest islets lie no more than a challenging swim from southeast mainland China, a few hundred miles from Covid Ground Zero in Wuhan.
(A quick note for readers whose lives are not so intimately connected to Asia: Thailand is the shape of a bent shamrock between Vietnam and Myanmar, where everyone smiles when you go there on holiday but can be jailed for dissing their weird billionaire king, like the woman who just got 87 years in jail for a FB post, reduced to 45 years because she admitted her guilt). Taiwan is the ovoid island a bit up from Hong Kong that was a backwater Chinese province, until all the Nationalists fleeing China when Chairman Mao took over fled there in 1949, and ever since has been busy exporting stuff around the world while hoping to avoid the fate of Hong Kong).
Those dreamy days when we could say at least it’s not as bad as France are long behind us. Of their 68M people, 78,000 have died from Covid. Of our 65M, we’ve raced past 112,000 at the time of writing. Taiwan has 24M people, at well over twice Britain’s population density, and a total Covid death toll of… nine. Nope, not 9,000, not even 900. I just double-checked. It was a big deal in Taiwan, because they were stuck on 7 deaths between April and a few weeks ago so another two people dying in such quick succession was huge deal in Taiwan. It’s strange how going from 7 to 9 deaths generates so much more media attention than going from 70,000 to 90,000. What does that say about us?
I try to avoid listening to the news these days, so can’t be sure if politicians and commenters (but rarely experts) are still asserting, straight-faced and unchallenged, that way back in March no one could possibly have known what was going to happen. But I imagine they are.
Were I less leery of social media, I would have been Tweeting (Twittering? Twatting?) constantly whenever I heard this dangerous, disingenuous lie. Claiming we were powerless to take any action until we’d seen the re-enactments of Dante’s Inferno taking place in northern Italian hospitals, is a metaphorical version of the hand-washing that constituted our PM’s initial response to the Covid Threat. Remember him reminding us, all that time ago, with trademark boyish smirk, to sing Happy Birthday twice? I think it was during that brief gap between him bragging about shaking hands with everyone on a Covid ward, and his return visit as an ICU patient.
Were I less grumpy about the data-snaffling of our Silicon Valley Overlords, I’d be posting almost daily, ticking off the one-year anniversaries of each of the 124 action points that have made up Taiwan’s Covid response so far. Actually, to be precise, I’d have been doing that since last year.
I believe Taiwan’s 124 Points should be every bit as well-known as Salisbury Cathedral’s 123-meter spire was post-Novichok, or the Home Office’s Australian-Style Points-Based Immigration System post-Referendum. That’s why I’m going to keep repeating the number, so please note this is a conscious choice and not a proof-reading oversight. We need some cheering up, I’m always told when I remain silent or slowly shake my head when anyone talks about their Easter skiing holiday plans, or what a relief it will be to get back to normal once the vaccination is over. So here’s my Good News. The number we should be cheering ourselves up with is not whatever today’s six-figure death toll is, but 124. Why? Because it shows us, as plainly as we could wish, exactly how we can stop killing ourselves, if only we can stop our magical thinking that we’re only one last push, one more massively expensive single technology rollout (Track&Trace, Moonshot mass testing, and now vaccinations), away from ‘getting back to normal’.
Somehow, hardly any British doctors I know have heard of the 124 Points. Taiwan’s impressive bilingual government website is keen, and proud, to share it’s 124-Point Emergency Plan. There are no obstacles to curious journalists, non-medical pundits and other rent-a-gobs reading all about every one of their one hundred and twenty-four points. Maybe there’s some political/technical/weirdo reason why some people won’t/can’t/don’t trust or access Taiwan’s website. But it’s just as easy to find elsewhere — it just took me 60 seconds to discover one particularly good one. The American Medical Association has thoughtfully published (and, rather cheekily I thought, copyrighted) an excellent summary of the 124 Points, broken down by date and category. There’s one section for Border Control, Travel Restrictions, and Case Finding, another for Resource Allocation, and a third for Communications and Politics. Just Google it — or rather Duck Duck Go it, Qwant it, or Ecosia it. It really makes sobering reading.
On December 31 2019 — that’s twenty nineteen lest you thought that was a typo — Taiwan hit Go on its own oven-ready plan, setting in motion its 124-Point (I did warn you) master strategy by sending public health inspectors aboard planes arriving from Wuhan to check temperatures. Now I just had to fact-check this (it took all of 10 seconds, Wikipedia is very good on this stuff) because I thought I must have got the date wrong, but Dec 31st was the same day doctors in Wuhan flagged the first unconfirmed report of a worrying-sounding infection, and eight days before Chinese scientists identified the virus that was become known as SARS-CoV-2 as the cause of the new mystery pneumonia.
Precisely because they’re so comprehensive, diverse and greater than the sum of their parts, it’s hard to summarize all of Taiwan’s list of short, sharp, joined-up actions (How many actions? All together now! Darts commentators this time — WOON HOONDRED AN’ TWENTTTY FOOOUR!!!).
Here’s more advice for the pundits and PMQ wide boys (they do, for some reason, tend to be male) who like to pick up a single issue, such as mask-wearing, as if it were a single slice of Swiss cheese, and satirically poke their fingers through the holes. Mate, if you stack up, say, 124 slices of Swiss cheese, I’d like to see you try to poke your Good Old British Banger sausage fingers through that lot. SMELL MY CHEESE!
Part 3 of 5 to follow tomorrow
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