Taiwan: 24M people, 7 deaths Fla.: 21.5M people, 17K deaths
TAIPEI, Taiwan – Moroccan Hasnaa Fatehi finds it safe, easy to navigate and full of exciting things to do. Australian Paul Whiteley came for the work and is now staying for the work.
They’re both living in Taiwan, which has dodged the brunt of COVID-19.
Eight months after the World Health Organization declared the deadly disease a global pandemic, there are few places – mostly islands in the South Pacific – where coronavirus hasn’t spread.
But there are some larger locales, such as Taiwan, a bustling technology hub home to about 24 million people off the coast of southeastern China, where there have been no lockdowns or curbs on economic activity, and where people still pack onto subways and mob busy shopping streets as if it were still precoronavirus times – save for ubiquitous fever checks, stringent rules about wearing face masks and fewer foreign tourists.
“I would have been twiddling my thumbs in Australia,” said Whiteley, 49, an events producer. He returned to Taiwan from Melbourne in May after working away for several months. Now Whiteley does weekly corporate entertainment gigs and children’s programs.
“It was better to get back where I could operate and do my business freely,” he said.
Taiwan has registered just 607 coronavirus cases this year and seven related deaths, according to the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control. Florida has a slightly smaller population (21.5 million), but has recorded more than 897,000 cases and 17,600 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 tracker.
Late last month, Taiwan reached a record 200 days without any domestic transmission of the disease. The U.S. recently marked a grim milestone: 250,000 coronavirus deaths.
Such is the allure of this relatively COVID-free, self-ruled territory that approvals for some types of residency permits have more than doubled over the course of the year, according to data provided to USA TODAY by the National Development Council, a government agency that drafts Taiwan’s overall policy and plans for economic development.
More than 820 entrepreneur residency permits have been approved this year, for example, up from 358 in 2019.
“Had I stayed in British Columbia, (life) would have been much harder,” said Fatehi, 40, who was born in Morocco but had been living in Canada before arriving in Taiwan as part of a business trip. Fatehi is the founder of a company that helps medical-device manufacturers get regulatory approval for their products. She reached Taiwan in January and applied for a three-year entrepreneur’s residency permit in Taiwan in May, as the coronavirus pandemic was still in its first wave. It was approved five weeks later.
Taiwan closed its borders early on and blocked local coronavirus transmission through a combination of rigorous contract-tracing, a mandatory 14-day quarantine period for every person who enters from abroad and near universal mask-wearing.
There is wide compliance with the rules. Taiwan, like other countries in some parts of Asia, has also benefitted from its experience dealing with a 20022004 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that killed 800 people across the world.
Other places that have adopted stringent coronavirus strategies, such as New Zealand, Singapore and Senegal have also fared well at keeping infections and deaths at bay.