Day 304: The Case for Taiwan

A while back, I told a friend about the Taiwan Gold Card (a special visa that lets you enter Taiwan during the pandemic — I’ll write more about this in a future post), and he was interested but was concerned about the risk of getting coronavirus there. It’s close to China after all, right?

I laughed because he couldn’t have been more wrong. Let’s look at the numbers!

🇺🇸 USA

Population

New coronavirus cases

We just passed 100,000 new cases in a single day for the first time.

100,000. In a single day.

And it’s going to get worse with the coming winter.

🇹🇼 Taiwan

Population

This is about 7% of the population of the US.

New coronavirus cases

If Taiwan had the same population-to-new-cases ratio as the US, it would have 7,000 cases. Instead, they have one.

(They recently reached a record 200 days without any domestically transmitted cases — the new cases in the graph above are people arriving from abroad.)

Still haven’t chosen a date or booked my flight, but I’m excited to go. I miss working in coffee shops and meeting new people.