As Taiwan’s embattled CECC chief Chen Shi-chung has publicly toyed with the idea of fully reopening Taiwanese borders to travelers to Taiwan, including new exceptions for business travelers, many in Taiwan are watching in horror as COVID success story New Zealand grapples with an insurmountable explosion in cases just days after opening their own borders.
Source: Health.govt.nz
New Zealand’s COVID policies and trajectory have largely mirrored Taiwan, with strict border closures and quarantine measures for the island country. For that reason, tight restrictions have meant that the country has largely escaped the mass deaths experienced by other Western countries, and social stability has meant that the economy has gone relatively unscathed.
This all changed in recent days as New Zealand underwent the first stage of its reopening on February 28th, leading to a massive increase in infections that threatens to overwhelm the small countries healthcare system, spiking to more than 20,000 cases a day.
New Zealand authorities were confident that high vaccination numbers would protect their population, with New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern stating, “with our community better protected we must turn to the importance of reconnection.” But this appears to be a crude miscalculation.
American news sources just as the New York Times have been gloatingly reporting the news suggesting that such a spike was inevitable and that New Zealand now has to share the suffering of the United States after its disastrous performance.
Still, there was nothing foregone about this decision by the PM, in large part responding to faulty planning and extremely poorly implemented border controls.
Taiwan has used its underutilized hotel industry to serve as the means of its quarantine centers, and for that reason has not struggled with the limited numbers. New Zealand relied on special and highly limited managed isolation quarantine (MIQ) facilities. The extremely limited number of spaces led the country to enforce quotas on incoming flights, putting massive pressure on the government, and leading to protests, to whose demands the government acceeded in recent weeks, leading to disastrous results.
New Zealand so far has only 63 COVID deaths, far lower than Taiwan’s 853 deaths, albeit with a population a fifth of the size. Still, with quarantine measures still in place in Taiwan, the newly reported local case numbers for the entire country yesterday totalled 3, versus 17,582 in New Zealand.
Taiwan will reopen to foreign business travelers beginning on March 7th, and those travellers can also apply for a reduced quarantine time, outraging Taiwanese citizens who feel that exceptions are being made for foreign economic elites that put the entire country at risk, and for which they do not benefit.
If Taiwan’s case numbers rise as a consequence, there is much speculation that Chen Shi-chung’s DPP will sacrifice its electoral future in giving in to the demands of business despite national support for the quarantine rules to remain in place.