Taiwan is slowly losing grip on coronavirus containment due to human selfishness

Barely a week passed since I wrote my last post about the coronavirus situation in Taipei, and I was confident that my next post will be a month later. Boy was I wrong. So here we are just 8 days later, and Taiwan's number of infected people jumped from 49 to 67. I actually knew this will happen. So what is the reason for the spike, you might ask?

Well, Europe and US exploded with cases, which had a big consequence: Taiwanese living, studying or traveling over there have started to return. Most of these 19 cases are imported (read about the latest here), and I'm afraid more and more of them will keep coming until the government completely blocks air traffic. They already limited it further, but have not yet fully implemented it. The worst case among these new 19 cases was that one of a student, who was touring Greece since January and returned on March 5. He then went to school for a full week before he noticed symptoms and was confirmed a case (source). As a consequence all students and staff are now in quarantine and the school is closed down. We have yet to see how much of the virus he has spread in his community in the week where he went about his daily life. I am not very optimistic here. If you thought this was bad, there is worse.

Selfishness will lead to more deaths in Taiwan

I can't completely blame the student for going to Europe in January, way before the big outbreak over there, but I do hope he'd at least self-quarantine after his return. He should've known that in early March the infections started to explode in many parts of the old continent. With that sad, he's not the worst human out there. The 54th case takes the trophy, though. This is a tale of a Taiwanese male who told his boss, that he's going on a holiday in Taiwan. In reality he was lying, and he went to Thailand and Japan, because the tickets are so cheap now. He came back with the virus, and became a confirmed case. His roommates had to be quarantined, and his company had to be disinfected, which means it had to be shut down for 3 days. Not only the company, which occupied 1 floor in an office building, the whole building had to be closed down. The guy was fired.

Currently there's another developing story circulating on Taiwan's social media: A neighborhood community representative organized a trip to Spain a few days ago. The story says that a lot of people had some reservations about traveling to Europe right now. They (20 people) have paid around 2400 USD per person a while ago and some wanted their money back, but the representative told them that they'll get around 460 USD back, because the Taiwanese government pays 33 USD / day (1000 NTD) to everyone who comes back from affected countries and has to self-quarantine for 14 days. So she basically pitched the quarantine money as a discount, and sent them off to virus infested Spain. This woman is literally playing with people's lives here, this is terribly irresponsible.

I have no idea what will happen in the upcoming days, but so far (on paper) Taiwan still remains in stage 1 - containment. The government did a splendid job for over 2 months ensuring that citizens are safe. They're aggressively tracking down every case and putting people in quarantine. You really won't find many governments that are doing a better job. But now that the whole world is affected and more and more selfish people entered the scene, I'm afraid the days of us being a safe haven are soon to be over. The government can only do so much, a big part of this containment is personal discipline and responsibility, and there's always a few bad apples that spoil it for everyone else. Maybe tomorrow cases explode, maybe not. It seems to be just a matter of when, not a matter of if.



This is how the city of Nanjing responded to the coronavirus crisis. This might await us in Taipei, too.