TWO news items caught my attention yesterday. The first was about a team of 12 doctors from mainland China visiting hospitals in Manila. They recommended that the country, still at high risk of infections, put up “shelter hospitals” for isolation of COVID-19 patients.
What an insult added to injury! Coming from the birthplace of the coronavirus, those Chinese “medical experts” should never have been invited to come to the Philippines at the height of the lockdown period. Their “benevolent intervention” could be a mask to cover up what is emerging as China’s biggest crime against humanity.
Most of us may have viewed YouTube documentaries blaming China for deliberately engineering the virus as a biological weapon to fulfill her quest for world domination.
The other news from the “other China” revealed that Taiwan’s government was donating 300,000 face masks to the Philippines to help our frontliners fight the COVID pandemic. Millions of such masks are also on their way to other pandemic-stricken nations.
Taiwan had made those masks as one of its precautionary measures to minimize or curb contamination. Ironically, since those measures have paid off, the grateful Taiwanese would have to find more needy recipients of the masks abroad.
To this day, with Taiwanese people “social distancing” and going out only when necessary, it’s generally business-as-usual in Taiwan. They call it “culture of obedience”.
It seems a miracle that Taiwan, with a population of 23 million, has only 393 confirmed COVID-19 cases, of which only six victims have died. These numbers have remained unchanged, which means that no additional cases have added since March 9 or one month and one week ago.
Why is that so when more or less three million people fly the 200-kilometer distance between Taiwan and China every year?
For a little bit of history, Taiwan used to be a prefecture or island province of China. However, after the civil war in 1949, the Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek refused to join Mao Zedong’s Communist Party and set up its own government in Taiwan.
China still considers Taiwan its province, albeit “renegade”, and has been pressuring the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO) never to recognize it as a separate nation. Taiwan has managed to rise on its own, however.
During the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003, Taiwan was among the worst-hit territories. It quarantined 150,000 people, of whom only 181 died.
No wonder then that as news of the coronavirus began to spill out from Wuhan City, China in December 2019, Taiwan’s National Health Command Center (NHCC) – set up in the wake of SARS – quickly responded to the potential threat.
Taiwan’s lady President, Tsai Ing-wen, was quick to implement decisive measures, among which were: travel ban to and from China, ban of cruise ships docking at the island’s ports, and strict punishments for anyone found breaching home quarantine orders.
Taiwanese officials lost no time testing residents with pneumonia for coronavirus.
On the contrary, in those days here in the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte was resisting public demand for banning air travel to and from China; not even when Sen. Riza Hontiveros raised the “pastillas” issue on thousands of illegal Chinese tourists and workers paying P10,000 under the table to immigration personnel in Manila.
During a “question hour” with Health secretary Francisco Duque, Rep. Loren Legarda (Antique) suggested to ban the entry of Chinese from China to prevent an outbreak similar to Wuhan’s but the former could only echo the President’s warning against “political and diplomatic repercussions”.
When will we ever learn? (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
