Taipei, Taiwan – As China tries to contain the worst coronavirus outbreak, while imposing restrictions on tens of millions of people in their homes, people in Taiwan are watching closely, often atrocious.
Road accidents in Shanghai are quickly censored in China, but have received widespread attention in Taiwan.
Taiwan has supplied ammunition to those who believe living with the virus is inevitable, after deciding how to deal with its escalating infections, rising economic costs and human casualties with China’s unshakable “zero karma” policy.
China is a joke to the rising stars of Taiwanese political satire
Taiwanese living in China’s largest city of 25 million have appeared on TV shows and magazines to describe their experiences of finding food and their plans to return to Taiwan after traveling freely.
Like China, Taiwan has gradually joined with countries that have abandoned efforts to eradicate the virus and have implemented a broad strategy of contact, tight border controls and masked orders to curb transmission.
Unlike Beijing, the Taipei government announced this month that it will gradually move to a mitigation strategy despite facing its largest outbreak to date. On Friday, Central Epidemic Command announced a record number of cases for the 12th consecutive day in Taiwan, with 11,974 new local infections bringing cumulative confirmed cases to 100,000.
Despite the increase, Taiwan has resisted the implementation of similar lockdown measures adopted during the first major pandemic outbreak in May 2021. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said on Tuesday during a visit to the CECC that preventative measures had come into effect. a new phase of “serious case cleanup, minor case management and normal life” while improving access. Information on tests and vaccination rates in the elderly.
Opinion polls show that Taiwanese society is evenly divided when asked whether it will pursue the zero-sum approach that includes lockdown and quarantine. A survey Of 1,071 people surveyed on Tuesday by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation, 46.3% of respondents disagreed with the idea and 45% supported it when it came to making the simple choice between maintaining or abandoning a policy of “coexistence”. (The Foundation has not called for the phasing out of the restrictions.)
Li Jung-Chang, founder of Quickseek, a research firm that controls Taiwanese public opinion, says that two record-breaking explosions occurred simultaneously in China and Taiwan naturally became part of the discussion.
His analysis found that the debate over coexistence with the virus in Taiwan and the local debate over strict lockdown measures in Shanghai have grown and dwindled together. In addition, 80% of Taiwanese social media posts and articles criticized the situation in Shanghai, while nearly half said the city’s coronavirus control measures were “violent” and “violating human rights”.
“This is proof that zero covariance is no longer possible for those living in Taiwan,” and the question in turn is how to live with the virus, Lim said.
However, the debate is not over and many in Taiwan have expressed concern over the current increase in cases. Authorities are not only struggling to increase vaccination rates for the elderly and prevent overcrowding in the health care system, but are faced with the delicate task of helping society cope with the new rule and seeing doctors only when needed.
Chiu Wei-ting, a 28-year-old nurse who works in the ambulance room of a Taipei hospital, said last week was grueling as the outbreak caused the number of patients to double. “There were too many people,” she said. “Most didn’t need to go to the hospital because they only had mild symptoms, but many wanted to feel safe.”
For Hung Shao-hua, the founder of a 30-year-old marketing company in Taipei, his main concern after testing positive recently was the reaction of his family and colleagues. He only had mild symptoms, but that didn’t stop his relatives from checking him regularly. The aunt cried when she learned that Hung was infected.
“Many people are not yet mentally prepared to live with the virus. “Basically, we weren’t two and now suddenly it’s everywhere,” she said.
Taiwan takes a phased approach to opening up. The quarantine period for close contacts has been reduced from seven to three days and the QR code system for contact tracing has been replaced with a new application. It uses Bluetooth to automatically detect and alert people in the vicinity of positive cases. However, the demand for masks continues in the community and the government has not yet announced a timetable for opening the borders, which means that all arrivals still have to be quarantined for 10 days.
For most of the pandemic, the 24 million island democracies were a success story of the Covend control. It imposed restrictions on travelers from Wuhan as early as January 2020 and maintained them nearly a year ago until the virus spread in May 2021, which was contained within two months.
Since then, the government has worked to raise the rate of late vaccines relative to developed countries. Nearly 80% of the population has now received two doses of a 60% increase, but the government is still concerned about improving coverage of the vulnerable elderly population, with 72% over the age of 75 fully vaccinated.
Taiwanese officials were also much more willing than their Chinese counterparts in one study to admit that omycron, while highly contagious, causes less severe disease than previous variants. Prime Minister Su Zheng-Chang told local media last week that it is less urgent than before as 99.5 percent of cases in the current outbreak have no mild symptoms or no symptoms. “We will not close the cities like Shanghai did, but we will not remove the masks and we will not stop the virus containment measures,” he said.
Taiwan’s vision of a free and open society, which differs significantly from China’s top-down patriarchal governance model, makes it difficult for the government to reset restrictions on movement.
Ho Ma-shang, assistant professor of biomedical sciences at the Sinica Academy, Taiwan Academy of Scientific Research, warns the government that zero covariance is no longer possible. “It’s hard to limit people to Taiwan. “We are used to freedom,” she said.
When 73-year-old Chu Chang-ming heard about a positive event in his building at Veterans Residence in New Taipei on Thursday, he was very concerned not about the possibility of contracting Covid, but that it might not happen. to be able to leave the room again.
At the time of the eruption in May last year, Chu had been closed on campus for nearly three months. “At the time I was supporting Zero Covid because I thought I might die because we didn’t have the vaccines,” he said. “Now that I am fully infused and empowered, I feel more relaxed.”
“I think it’s best to open,” Chum said. It would drive people crazy if we shut it down like Shanghai. “
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Source: Washington Post
John Cameron is a journalist at The Nation View specializing in world news and current events, particularly in international politics and diplomacy. With expertise in international relations, he covers a range of topics including conflicts, politics and economic trends.
