Taiwan has ridden out the coronavirus pandemic mostly unscathed, while Britain has been crippled economically and in human terms. Taiwan has lost 10 people, and had just 1,000 documented cases, the vast majority of them among quarantined travellers. “We didn’t have a Sars pandemic plan, because it didn’t seem as though that would be the next pandemic, though it seems so wrong to say that now. Dr Chen Chien-jen, now a professor at the Academia Sinica genomics research centre, was Taiwan’s health minister during the 2003 Sars outbreak. “At the beginning of this Covid-19 outbreak, I think a lot of governments had the same challenges we had during the Sars outbreak,” Chen said.

Source: The Guardian March 24, 2021 04:52 UTC