Five months ago, in October 2019 my family moved out of the USA to a little Pacific Island right next to China: the country of Taiwan. I didn’t know the exact reason for moving to Taiwan, but looking back, I had realized the huge reason why: the coronavirus outbreak.
Of course, at the start of 2020, the coronavirus has rampaged Asia including countries like Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Thailand. I was feeling pretty bad about going back to Taiwan, considering the fact that there were barely any COVID-19 cases in America except for San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston. Taiwan already had a handful of coronavirus cases. Afterwards, Chinese New Year rolled around and as predicted, people started travelling from one country to another in the East Asian region. Even more people were tested positive for the new virus, and Taiwan already had thirty cases, a third of which emerged in the metro area of Taipei. The virus is still accumulating, but with Taiwanese people washing their hands properly and wearing face masks, the government prevented any further contamination of the virus.
By the time February and March rolled around, the United States exploded with the virus. Of course, the virus started small, in several states like California, Washington, and New York. Then, the little red circles that represented outbreaks became larger and larger, until neighbouring states outbreak with the virus and so on until every state was infected. Now in the United States, people are languishing over this coronavirus and as a result, people are emptying the Costco shelves. The coronavirus is now spreading exponentially and is increasing by the thousands in the States.
I had already predicted this because of my own experience in the public. I have repeatedly noticed that some people don’t even wash their hands when they use the bathroom or get home, which can lead to many pathogens in the house. Also, when the outbreak started in America people did not wear face masks, which can lead to cough droplets flying everywhere. Yuck!
So what differences can you see in these two countries? Well, we can see one huge distinction. In Taiwan, the branch of medical healthcare at the national level has acted very quickly to convince the president and government to start testing potential patients for the coronavirus and has fired up the face mask production in multiple counties. The captain of the healthcare branch Chen Shi-Zhong has encouraged the citizens of Taiwan to wash their hands properly and to avoid close contact with others, also known as social-distancing.
America, however, is a different story. President Trump and Congress did nothing as the outbreak began, which led to national hospitals begging for the COVID-19 testing support. These “testing” processes happened at a very slow rate and therefore did not catch the infected people who were already walking into bars crammed with people. In New York, when the outbreak was at a moderate level, people were squeezed into one another and definitely not social distancing. In a video I saw recently, two men were coughing, already falling to the floor because they were already infected with the virus. Nevertheless, the Trump administration and Congress has started a month after the initial outbreak, which is too late for containing the coronavirus. Of course, Trump did not convince the citizens to thoroughly wash their hands when they got home. What is this madness?! And he even said on CNN to keep people coming to work!? This is definitely a bad thing for a lot of people in urban areas.
Now in America, every day hundreds of people are lining up at Costco’s doors to wait for the doors to open. The line extends up to the parking lot and around cars. The moment the door opens, people in the front rush out and grab everything they want and need, such as 75 rolls of toilet paper, 100 granola bars, 10 bananas, 40 ready-to-go meals and of course, checking out and running to their cars as fast as they can. It’s sort of like the first come – first serve thing in restaurants. By the time noon comes, everything is gone from Costco except a few stray toys and tools no one wants to buy.
So what’s our solution? And how will we get through future pandemics?
- Faster response. Taiwan did a great job of responding as soon as possible and providing medical care for those who are sick. America needs to change that and hopefully, for the future presidents and Congresses, we can develop a faster and effective way of duelling with this coronavirus. The process should be the same for ALL countries.
- Budgeting. All countries on an international level need to budget more for their vaccine development in case of a global emergency such as COVID-19. Spend less money on political arguments and start budgeting a portion of the federal taxes on vaccines.
- Quarantines. The government of a country should be prioritized to test every patient for any disease and to quarantine those who test positive as soon as possible. For example, the government of Italy acted too late: there were already 25,000 cases or more when they started to start a national lockdown.
- The most important: humans on Earth need to act as a global team, not as competitors. As I said with the Costco rampage, people need to work together more in order to establish global tranquillity. In the 20th century, when the two World Wars and the Great Depression slapped America on the face, people immediately started helping each other by supporting their neighbour’s needs. Even in times of panic in the early 21st century such as 9/11, the 2003 Eastern blackout and Hurricane Katrina, people helped each other by donating welfare to organizations and praying for those in need. What happened twenty years later? People shouldn’t need to steal over toilet paper, they should buy sufficient needs to help the ones who are harmed by the epidemic! So, to sum it up, people need to help each other more instead of being greedy idiots.
I believe that the world can be a better place if we simply follow these four simple steps.
To all of you guys: stay healthy and go be a part of the solution, not the problem!
For those of you who are concerned because of the coronavirus, click here for a John Hopkins map of the coronavirus outbreak: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
