The question is not what Australia did wrong -- 20 countries have more cases than Australia, and seven have more than 10 times as many -- but how Taiwan has kept the virus under control when other parts of the world have not.
Hard learned lessons
During the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003, Taiwan was among the worst-hit territories, along with Hong Kong and southern China. More than 150,000 people were quarantined on the island -- 180 kilometers (110 miles) off China's southeastern coast -- and 181 people died.
While SARS now pales in comparison to the current crisis, it sent shockwaves through much of Asia and cast a long shadow over how people responded to future outbreaks. This helped many parts of the region react faster to the current coronavirus outbreak and take the danger more seriously than in other parts of the world, both at a governmental and societal level, with border controls and the wearing of face masks quickly becoming routine as early as January in many areas.
Taiwan has a world-class health care system, with universal coverage. As news of the coronavirus began to emerge from Wuhan in the run up to the Lunar New Year, officials at Taiwan's National Health Command Center (NHCC) -- set up in the wake of SARS -- moved quickly to respond to the potential threat, according to a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
"Taiwan rapidly produced and implemented a list of at least 124 action items in the past five weeks to protect public health," report co-author Jason Wang, a Taiwanese doctor and associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine, said in a statement. "The policies and actions go beyond border control because they recognized that that wasn't enough."
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