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by Brian Shilhavy
May 07, 2020
from
HealthImpactNews Website
Italian
version
Rainbow Riverside Park
Taipei
'Johns Hopkins University' had predicted that,
Taiwan would have the
second most COVID-19 cases in the world, due to its close proximity
to Mainland China...
But astonishingly, in spite of being only 80 miles from the coast of
China with over 400,000 of its 24 million citizens working in China,
as of mid-April, the country only had 400 cases of COVID-19, and
only 6 deaths.
And the vast majority of their 400 cases came into
the country from abroad...
All of this has happened without shutting down the country with lock
downs, and with almost all of its businesses continuing to operate.
Is Taiwan doing something else the rest of the world is largely
missing?
This question will no doubt be asked for months or even years into
the future, but it is a question well worth asking, given the
devastating effects to the economy that have resulted from more
restrictive measures such as the United States took.
The first thing to note is that while President
Trump is now looking
seriously at pulling out of the World Health Organization (WHO), Taiwan
was never part of it.
They were not allowed to join due to the WHO's
pro-China stance...
According to the
Taipei Times,
Taiwan's CDC tried to warn China and WHO on
December 31, 2019 about possible human-to-human transmission of the
new coronavirus, while China was still denying that such
transmission was possible.
That same day,
Taiwan started policies to monitor travel from China to reduce the
chance of having the coronvirus come into their country.
They were
one of the first countries to restrict travel from China at their
borders.
Taiwan had bad
experiences from
the 2003 SARS
- another coronavirus - outbreak in
China, and as a result their hospitals were well supplied with
equipment to handle any outbreaks.
This SARS situation had
reportedly taught them to have a healthy distrust in China and the
World Health Organization to accurately report facts, and to have
their own plan in place for future outbreaks.
But unlike the U.S.
and many other countries, Taiwan did not quarantine the entire
nation.
They focused on,
quarantining travelers coming in from abroad
in their own homes, while the rest of the nation went about their
business, with some restrictions in place such as wearing face
masks, and practicing social distancing.
It is hard to argue
with their reported results so far, with so few actual cases and
very few deaths. They kept the country open, and did not destroy
their economy.
John Ransom,
reporting for
TownHall Finance writes:
Protests in the
streets, oil trading at negative numbers, rapidly spiraling
unemployment, locked-down international travel and trade:
I
think we can all agree that by any barometer, including these,
the world has failed the Wuhan flu test.
Why the world's
answer to the China flu has been so disastrously wrong,
ill-thought out and ignorant to reality can be left to future
post-mortems.
But after spending literally trillions on public
health over the decades to prevent just such an occurrence, it's
clear by now that the world's investment in public health
professionals was wasted.
We can debate
whether the cost was worth it, but there is no denying that the
cost has been beyond anyone's imagining.
Some may argue
that in such a crisis, experts faced a no-win situation where
they had to either trade lives for the economy or the economy
for lives.
To that I give
a one-word answer:
Taiwan...
Taiwan is the
other "China".
It's a small island off the southern coast of
China, called the
Republic of China (ROC).
It was created as a bastion of
"free" China as the Communist Party took over mainland China (PRC).
The island may
be small, but the country is a regional and worldwide
powerhouse.
It's the
21st largest economy in the world (19th if counting by PPP),
despite having a population of just 24 million. It ranks 11th in
GDP per capita, comparable to Denmark and Sweden.
It's also an
important partner with Communist China as one of the leading
investors, trading partners and bankers for the PRC.
Consequently, Taiwan hosts quite a bit of contact with the PRC.
For comparison
sake, the United Sates saw about
3 million visitors from China in 2018, while Taiwan
hosted 2.6
million visitors from China in 2018.
That's why the
results from Taiwan in fighting China's Wuhan flu - as they call
it in Taiwan - is so extraordinary.
Worldwide there
have been 321 cases of COVID-19, or Wuhan flu, per million
people.
In Taiwan there have been
just 0.3
cases per million people for a total of 422 cases, with only
six total deaths.
Equally
important is that while the Taiwanese economy has been damaged
by the global shutdown, their domestic economy and society has
remained open.
Source
We report these
results as a comparison to what other actions have been taken in
other countries, that have had far more disastrous results.
We are
not necessarily endorsing everything that Taiwan has done, just
reporting the facts about their response and their results so far.
Many questions are
still unanswered.
Did the actions the Taiwan Government take cause a
much lower rate of reported infections of COVID-19?
Or are there
other factors involved that kept their infection rates lower?
Since
the SARS outbreak more than 15 years ago was so severe there, was
there some natural immunity against coronaviruses involved?
Did
their location closer to the equator with more sunlight and warmer
temperatures this time of year play a factor?
About the only
thing we do know for sure, is that the vaccine gods and their global
leaders like
Bill Gates and Dr.
Fauci and the WHO cannot take credit
for Taiwan's success, because they never were able to successfully
develop a vaccine for SARS, and they have successfully kept Taiwan
out of the WHO.
Writer Marc A.
Thiessen offers
his perspective:
This pandemic
has provided us with a clinical trial in the healing power of
freedom.
We can now compare two control groups in the form of
two Chinese societies:
Totalitarian
China has not only been ravaged by the virus but has also spread
the contagion to our shores. Free China has defeated it.
The lesson is
clear:
COVID-19
grew in the cesspool of Chinese Communist tyranny.
The antidote to
the coronavirus is freedom.
Source
Watch the PBS
News Hour report:
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