The Star (Toronto Star Newspapers)
Date: March 16, 2020
By: Miriam ShuchmanContributor

According to predictions based on airline travel, the island of Taiwan, just 160 km from China, was likely to be among the countries hardest hit by COVID-19. Several million Chinese visit Taiwan annually and about 3 million Taiwanese work in China, including 2,000 in Wuhan, where the outbreak began.

But Taiwan’s numbers have remained comparatively low, with 59 cases of the disease and only one death so far, in a country of 23.6 million. Dr. Chih-Hung Jason Wang, a Taiwanese-American pediatrician and health policy professor at Stanford University who described Taiwan’s experience in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said the country’s success reflects scores of strategies it’s using to battle the outbreak.    [FULL  STORY]