tl;dr | COVID situations in the US, India, Singapore, and Taiwan as of 1st Oct.
I am a Taiwanese who has been working in Singapore for more than four years. Since mid-March, my colleagues and I have been asked to “work from home (wfh)” by Singapore government policy.
In early July, I decided to move back to Taiwan and stay with my family. I took the flight on 12th July, quarantined for 14 days, self-monitored for another 7 days, and I intentionally isolated myself for a few more days before meeting anyone.
After all this process, now I’m in Taiwan and I can travel everywhere in Taiwan. The only policy I need to follow at the moment (end of Sep) is wearing a mask if I go to some public, indoor places like taking public transportations or going to a live concert. (Yes, Taiwan held the first live concert since the pandemic with over 10k+ audiences. We have the first scheduled baseball game season avid Covid-19 as well.)
The government recently launched the “Triple Stimulus Voucher” program to stimulate Taiwan’s sagging economy. When the entire world is figuring out how to deal with the pandemic, people in Taiwan are figuring out how to take the best advantage of the program. My friends and colleagues who stay (or are stuck) outside of Taiwan have been asking me “WHY”. Why is Taiwan so special and acting like normal, which is so abnormal, at this time?
Since the pandemic outbreak, I’ve been closely watching the situation in multiple countries, specifically Taiwan, the US, Singapore, and India. I want to jot down a few observations from the information I gathered.
Let’s start with the US
I heard from a commentary show that said “It really should not be that bad. This country is not poor, actually it’s one of the richest countries in the world. This country has the most talented people and some of the most innovative technology. It should have done a much better job, but it didn’t. Now it’s one of the worst places affected by the epidemic.”
In India
A country with one of the highest populations in the world, the government announced a national wide lockdown on 24 March for the first wave, less than one day in advance. With a population of almost 1.4 billion people, diverse literacy levels, different socioeconomic levels, that was an understandable decision for the government to make. However, it doesn’t mean that everyone in the country under this regulation can adapt to it immediately. We saw hundreds of millions of people who had previously left their hometowns, which could be hundreds of kilometers away from the cities they were in, to work in the cities for better opportunities, try desperately to go back to their hometown. Due to the lockdown, the domestic buses were being shut down, so many were even forced to walk that long distance. And many of them never reached home.
In Singapore
It is about three times the size of Taipei City, the pandemic was well controlled at the beginning. Until mid-April, there was a reasonable number of new cases each day. The government has been communicating with the public transparently via its official WhatsApp channel. However, one day in mid-April, there was a spike of more than three hundred new cases. Then it became more than seven hundred, then more than a thousand. Singapore is a country with a population of 5.6 million. Among the 5.6M people, 1.4M are foreign workers, who hold a work permit and stay in the country but are not citizens or permanent residents. Around one-third of the 1.4M foreign workers are foreign domestic workers or construction workers who stay in the dormitories and share the space with six to twelve people together. It’s hard to keep the social distance in these dormitories and that’s the main reason we have seen a spike since then.
Taiwan
Taiwan is coping with the pandemic well and experts from many countries have shown interest in knowing more about the so-called “Taiwan model”. As a Taiwanese person living overseas, that has made me feel relieved and proud of being a Taiwanese. However, after watching more videos and knowing more aspects of the approach applied in Taiwan, I realized that it is not a coincidence and we shouldn’t take it for granted or just attribute it to good luck. I still remember from one of the videos in which the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) leader said, “We knew we would not have as much information and support as other countries from the international organizations. And we can’t afford the risk. Hence we have been dealing with this extremely carefully since the beginning.” The different sectors are continuously taking various approaches, including reporting their statuses transparently, answering the questions from the public continuously, listening to their comments and acting on them, brainstorming with the experts from all specialties and continuously iterating on the policies, weighing the trade-offs among all the factors to come up with the best policy possible, not just handed down by the government, but generated together with the people, whoever wants to contribute.
After getting a glance at the situations in the US, India, Singapore, and Taiwan, though the pandemic is a crisis, I can’t help but want to dig deeper into the reasons behind it. And I’ll share more in the next article.
