Asia In-Depth Podcast: How Taiwan Smothered the Coronavirus

Students eat their lunch on desks with plastic partitions as a preventive measure to curb the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus at Dajia Elementary School in Taipei on April 29, 2020.
Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images
Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS Feed ∙ Download ∙ Full Episode Archive ∙ Listen on Spotify
Few places in the world have done a better job suppressing the coronavirus than Taiwan. In the three months since a 50-year-old woman became its first confirmed case, only six people have died from COVID-19 in Taiwan. (By contrast, New York state, a territory with roughly the same population, has lost over 19,000 lives). What makes Taiwan's success even more remarkable is that it lies only 100 miles from mainland China, where the virus originated.
What are the secrets behind Taiwan's success?
In this episode of Asia In-Depth, Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) Vice President for International Security and Diplomacy Daniel Russel speaks with two experts — Syaru Shirley Lin from the University of Virginia and Dr. Chunhuei Chi of Oregon State University — about what Taiwan's successful smothering of COVID-19 means for its future.