American vlogger creates video listing 20 ways Taiwan is keeping Wuhan coronavirus at bay

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/04/16
By: Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — As Taiwan sees its second day with zero new cases of Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) in a week, an American blogger has created a video expounding on how the plucky island country has been able to fend off the contagion, despite its proximity to communist China, the origin of the outbreak.

The video's creator, Dustin Pfundheller, 33, who is currently living in Florida where he works as a dentist, told Taiwan News that he created the video because he was so impressed that Taiwan, a country that is at an extremely high risk of a COVID-19 outbreak, had so few cases. He said that he first became acquainted with Taiwan when he studied at Shih Hsin University in the fall of 2007 and wanted both foreigners and Taiwanese to know what Taiwan had done to protect their citizens from the deadly disease.

The video, which was uploaded to Facebook on April 9, starts by explaining that before the outbreak started, four percent of Taiwanese worked in China, while 2,000 Chinese tourists on average visited the country per day. Pfundheller then pointed out that the epidemic first started during the Lunar New Year, the busiest time of the year for travel in both Taiwan and China, similar to Thanksgiving in the U.S.

He noted that despite the fact that Taiwan had initially been ranked as the second-highest country at risk of experiencing a major breakout of the virus by a Johns Hopkins University model, it actually now has the lowest case rate per million over the past 50 days in the world. To counter claims that only authoritarian regimes have been effective at containing the virus, Pfundheller stated the fact that Taiwan is a democracy.    [FULL  STORY]