I was looking at the numbers for coronavirus by country and one country that particularly stood out to me was Taiwan. I had visited there last year and had been impressed with the efficiency and cleanliness of Taipei, even though it was densely populated,
As of this morning there were only 59 cases and 1 death in a country of 24 million. And consider that the country had dozens of daily flights to mainland China, including Wuhan, and conducted a lot of its trade with China. Italy, in contrast, has 21,000 cases and almost 1500 deaths. How could this be possible? How can Taiwan have only half as many cases as the state of Colorado? What can we learn from Taiwan?
And in general, the countries of East Asia were much better prepared. Even Japan, which was criticized for its handling of the virus, is much better off than Europe. There are over 120 million people in Japan and it also had very strong connections to China. Additionally, it probably has the highest percentage of 70+ population in the world. Yet there are now 12 countries in Europe with more cases than Japan. Plus, a lot of the Japanese cases and deaths were from a cruise ship.
It seems like the mistake we made was not locking down everything as soon as we know it was here. Yes, the stock market would have taken a big hit and there might have been some layoffs, but by dragging it out we have prolonged the economic damage and allowed to virus to spread to half the population. It seemed like it was inevitable that we would end up shutting everything down anyway. Prolonging the inevitable has made the damage much, much worse. If we would have done it a month ago we would be through the worst of it by now.
And, yes, a lot of people said the virus was not as deadly as the flu and the media was overreacting. But China didn’t completely shut down an entire region and start building hospitals like crazy just for the heck of it. And if we didn’t think China was a warning to what could happen here we had the example of Italy. It’s been pretty sobering how chaotic and unprepared we are. We are lucky the virus was not a lot worse. In the Spanish flu, young adults were one of the groups that was actually most vulnerable to the virus. Also, the big expansion of the Spanish flu was in the summer and fall so we can’t always count on changes in the weather to help alleviate the impact.