Town Hall
Date: Apr 23, 2020
By: Matt Vespa

We covered this in March. Taiwan should have been ravaged by the Wuhan coronavirus. Its proximity to mainland China (though Taiwan is the real China), the fact that nearly a million of its citizens live in China, and around 400,000 work there. The travel is frequent. It should have spread like a brushfire, but as of today, they only have 400 total cases with six deaths. It’s incredible and something that maybe other nations should have taken note of to save lives. The US has over 830,000 Wuhan coronavirus cases, most of which are in the New York City area, with over 42,000 deaths from the disease. So, what did Taiwan do? Stanford Health Policy zeroed in on three key moves at the time, which has its roots in the 2003 SARS outbreak [emphasis mine]:

Stanford Health Policy’s Jason Wang, MD, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine who also has a PhD in policy analysis, credits his native Taiwan with using new technology and a robust pandemic prevention plan put into place at the 2003 SARS outbreak.

“The Taiwan government established the National Health Command Center (NHCC) after SARS and it’s become part of a disaster management center that focuses on large-outbreak 

responses and acts as the operational command point for direct communications,” said Wang, a pediatrician and the director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes, and Prevention at Stanford. The NHCC also established the Central Epidemic Command Center, which was activated in early January.
[FULL  STORY]