Lack of reporting on Asian covid success in European media

Discussion Greater Forumosa
41

Dude, public broadcasting is your friend! :tv: :slightly_smiling_face: :rainbow:

Contact tracing has been used very successfully by countries such as Taiwan and New Zealand to quash the virus. And it is proving highly effective in countries such as Argentina, Costa Rica and Jamaica.

https://www.dw.com/en/taiwan-prototypes-robot-for-covid-19-testing/av-55088142

Taiwan has never gone into complete lockdown and life has continued pretty much as normal, primarily because of its early and effective prevention work, as well as a highly regarded health care system.

Taiwan has recorded just 442 cases of coronavirus and seven deaths.

However, Taiwan was one of the first countries to implement serious measures to combat the virus, with its very early response resulting in just 440 reported cases and a death toll of seven. Critics say that had the WHO included Taiwan’s recommendations in its own response, the organization could have more rapidly curbed the spread of the virus.

She cited South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore as “clear examples of countries that do not economize on resources and technology to carry out rigorous contact tracing. All were successful.”

“Had the WHO allowed Taiwan’s health experts to share information and best practices in early January, governments around the world could have had more complete information on which to base their public health policies,” it said.

The country has been praised for its timely response, broad testing and high hospital capacity, much like South Korea and Taiwan in Asia.

In Britain, Brazil and the Philippines, the arrogance and ignorance displayed by leaders has cost lives. In New Zealand, Germany and Taiwan, in contrast, humility has proven to be a life-saving force.

That’s just going back to April, and I probably missed some because the headlines were about other things.

And then there are the videos.

We see how Taiwan reacted to the virus earlier and more decisively than almost any other country in the world, as Europe and North America were still lulling themselves into a false sense of security.

The film also tries to explain why countries like Germany and Taiwan were able to control the virus, while the US was simply overwhelmed by it.

Some countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan, are considered pioneers in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

https://www.dw.com/en/taiwans-effective-coronavirus-response/av-53043150

https://www.dw.com/en/who-failed-to-learn-from-taiwan-health-expert-tells-dw/av-52967083

https://www.dw.com/en/taiwan-prisoners-pay-it-forward-in-time-of-coronavirus/av-52723329

Obviously there’s a bit of hubris in there, but how many more reports do they need to make to satisfy you?

Most news, after all, is negative – Death toll rises sharply in Elbonia is always a more likely headline than Death toll rises very slowly in Elbonia. :cactus:

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Do you know Taiwan?

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The average American or European doesn’t know much about Taiwan because Taiwan is not very important to them, in spite of the screaming on various China threads that if Taiwan falls America is doomed- DOOMED,I tell ya!

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I think it’s still only a fraction of what is being reported on places closer to home though. But people do care more the closer they are to the locations that are being reported on so it makes sense that the news report on those more.

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Wow, point very well made there.

Something that occurred to me thinking about this is that generalizing that Europeans in geneneral, geneneralize, is in itself a generalization

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So why has the WHO been complimenting China in its success of their own virus?

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Because the virus originated in China, they were the first affected, yet managed to contain it (by harsh methods unacceptable elsewhere, true).

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Glad they dont get political … and can accept lieing, jailing doctors and covering everything up which killed thousands.

Heres the the problem. WHO does some good work. The idea of having something like the WHO, as with the UN , is also good. But when they publicly display continuous acts of political favoritism and painful corruption which has aldirectly rsesulted in many deaths and infections, they hollowed out their own coffin. Now everytime a flat earther talks about end of days government engineered virus propaganda, its hard to discredit them as total loons because the organizastions are publicly admitting essentially what alex jones types are speaking of. And the frogs are actually goin gay and transgender…damn :frowning:

I want a world health organization, not the WHO puppet…which is cutting its own head off and doesnt really need any help from conspiracy theorists.

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Its been proven that people leaving china have been tested negative, then after arriving back to their own countries tested positive. So clearly china is (Still, as their numbers have been lies from the start) doing worse than its letting on. The country is still lying about it.
So saying they managed to contain it, is speculation at best.

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Same with this logic could be said about Taiwan which does not seem to be true

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The persistent failure of governments in the major western democracies to control the pandemic

Public resistance to lockdown measures made early and strict restrictions, accompanied by effective test, trace and isolation policies, politically infeasible in most of Europe and the US all year. But aggressive restrictions and testing regimes have worked well in Asia and the Pacific. The comparative results are stark. The cumulative Covid-19 death rate per million of the population is nearly 740 in the US, and 760 in the UK, compared with 3 in China and 15 in Japan, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Opposition to enforced lockdowns in the major western countries is to some extent based on a libertarian belief in economic freedom. This is a legitimate political choice that is usually fully justified but has proved costly in current circumstances. Furthermore, public support for strict measures has been eroded by serious operational failings.

Political opinion has also been moulded by the epidemiological and economic characteristics of this pandemic, which are particularly challenging. Infectious diseases in their initial stages tend to grow at exponential rates. For example, if they double every three days, they will increase 1,000-fold within a month, unless slowed down by social distancing or herd immunity. But human beings struggle to grasp that idea, and instead tend to assume that the number of cases will grow by the same absolute number each day, leading them to underestimate the danger. This exponential growth fallacy is a well known feature of human behaviour, including in people who are trained to avoid it.

The natural time lag between cases, hospitalisations and then deaths further exacerbates the tendency to wait too long before announcing policy restrictions. Another issue, very familiar to economists, is the pervasive role that externalities have played in the spread of coronavirus. When an infectious person fails to self-isolate, many other people are placed at risk of disease and thus bear the costs of this individual’s decision. This should present a watertight case for public intervention to enforce social distancing and isolation, especially after positive tests.

Further complicating the response for democracies has been the argument over how to weigh the health benefits of lockdowns and social distancing against the economic costs. Over short periods, the two do conflict, but economist Simon Wren-Lewis has persuasively argued that this is not true in the longer term. That’s because a decision to avoid lockdowns today is likely to lead to exponential growth in cases in the future, resulting in more stringent restrictions, and greater damage to businesses. Considered dynamically, both health and the economy eventually benefit from early and decisive virus control. The failure of most western democracies to accept these arguments for early restrictions demonstrates the potency of the behavioural biases involved and their fundamental political belief in free markets.

(Financial Times)

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The virus is probably bio-weapon from the very beginning.

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yea china definitely has a much lower death rate than japan, nothing suspicious about that.

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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Coronavirus Vaccine in Taiwan - July/August 2021