In Part 1, I write about Taiwan’s brush with SARS in 2002-03, the beginnings of the crisis in January, and Taiwan’s initial reactions that put us on a path to getting ahead of the virus.

In Part 2, I write about the extended school closure in February, voluntary self-distancing, and the Diamond Princess.

In Part 3, I write about going back to school, watching the COVID-19 situation explode in Europe and the US, and why US higher education has made an epic mistake.

Part 4:

When I started writing my updates about COVID-19, I didn’t think there would be a Part 4. It seemed clear to me that the story of the coronavirus in Taiwan was a three part story, and it was holding steady. The focus would now be on the rest of the world, and anything I could write to help friends and family now encountering the same thing would be a good idea. Really, we must never think these things, because “That doesn’t apply to me or my country (anymore)” is exactly what got everyone in hot water in this pandemic. (The sheer hubris!) In short, last week, Taiwan has been battered by a new “second” wave of COVID-19 cases, imported from Europe and the US, and in response, has locked down its borders with all other countries, accepting no foreigners who do not already hold residence here. Those moves have definitely alarmed people, and now, supermarkets are busy right up until closing time, with much more empty shelves. We even saw an hour-long line for getting face masks at the local pharmacy. It took some of us by surprise, but it shouldn’t have, because among the many lessons to be learned in the COVID-19 pandemic is that the unexpected can, has, and will happen.

How did it happen? Even the Minister of Health Chen Shih-Chung has admitted that the authorities should have seen this coming earlier. On March 12 and March 13, the CDC reported two imported cases, the second case being an American man who had been infected by four friends from the US. Steve reported to me this grim evidence that the virus was much more widespread in the US than previously thought. The next day, the CDC imposed Level 2 restrictions on California, New York State, and Washington. On March 15, six new cases were confirmed in Taiwan, all of them imported. One of them was a high school student who had just come back from Greece. His homeroom at school was quarantined as a precaution, and when several days later, a second case was reported at his school, the entire school was shut down. These sorts of policies have enabled Taiwan to get ahead of the virus clusters, but as a result, several municipalities started announcing a policy which was quickly taken up by the entire Ministry of Education on Monday, March 16: no students or teachers at elementary through high schools were allowed to travel off-island until the end of the spring semester. On March 18, Taiwan moved the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand onto its Level 3 warning list, and at the same time also closed its borders to foreigners completely. Now, even Taiwanese citizens and those with residence certificates like us had to undergo an obligatory 14-day quarantine if we were traveling back to the island. The same day, 23 new cases were reported. And on March 20, Taiwan moved the entire world up to Level 3. The same day, 27 new cases showed up in Taiwan, with another 18 new cases diagnosed the next day on March 21. Finally, on March 20, we received one of only three emails we’ve gotten from the American Institute in Taiwan throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, tersely announcing a rare Level 4 Advisory, basically saying, “Come back to the US or stay abroad indefinitely.”

In the space of a single week, the quarantine and travel restrictions had changed with dizzying speed, keeping pace with the doubling of cases to a total of 169 as of Sunday, March 22. In fact, rather than wait for further restrictions to who could and could not enter school, with just such a mobile population, our school decided to start spring break early by a few days, and we left school on Wednesday, March 18, hoping to resume everything next Monday, March 30. Currently, that’s still the understanding, but with everything that’s happening, a week seems like a very long time. All of a sudden, even our trip on island to Yilan later this week is starting to look slightly irresponsible, and Steve has been going back and forth on whether we should make the 30-minute trip by cab, hotel shuttle, or public bus or train.

On March 19, Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen went on record as saying the next two weeks are a crucial test for Taiwan. Given that the borders have been effectively shut down and all incoming travelers must complete a mandatory quarantine, if the jump to community transmission happens, it will be right now. So how is quarantine being enforced? Here is a FAQ for passengers just arriving in Taiwan, and a flowchart showing what happens to passengers (though it’s outdated). When they get here, Taiwan has arranged for quarantine-ready taxis to take them to their residence anywhere on island or a pre-arranged quarantine hotel. The government is even helping with subsidies for travelers or family members of travelers who need those hotel rooms. (This is a pretty ingenious move given that the entire travel industry in Taiwan is suffering badly, just as their global counterparts, so giving them business that also facilitates safe entry into the country is a great idea.) Once at home, the government will use your cellphone to track your movements, and may call you several times a day to ensure that you’re where you said you would stay for 14 days. In fact, this tweet from a Taiwanese college student has gone viral (I’m so sorry) this week, showing the speed and seriousness of the quarantine policy:

To alleviate further stress, people are being offered NT $1,000, which is just over USD $30 per day to stay in quarantine. While some have expressed unease over these regulations, I have come around to the notion that it’s worth avoiding the risk of infection from these travelers, whether Taiwanese or foreign, because people are going to take risks! Early on in January, one man was found to have avoided quarantine and shown up at a Kaohsiung dance club, and eventually he was fined nearly USD $10,000 for not disclosing his symptoms. In March, after the COVID-19 pandemic was already broadly known, one man evaded quarantine and was actually found at the Kaohsiung International Airport trying to fly out of the country. He was eventually fined to the full extent of the regulations, for USD $33,000, which is a pretty penny indeed. Right now, telecom providers are working closely with the government to make this sort of tracking possible, but I feel pretty confident that if any country’s government is going to give up this sort of power later, it’s going to be Taiwan.

Though community spread looks unlikely given the strict quarantine procedures, there are other concerns for foreigners like us. Many expats here, including a lot of friends, take advantage of Taiwan’s generous visa waiver policies, which have long indicated that if you just transit in and out of Taiwan every 90 days (or 3 months), you can basically stay here indefinitely. No one in immigration bats an eye seeing your passport full of blue exit and entry stamps. On our very first trip to Taiwan in 2013, we met a British man who bragged about having spent 20 years here, while never getting legal working or living status. It’s very common for people to talk about going to Hong Kong or Okinawa for a day on a “visa run”, even though it’s not very accurate because you don’t have a visa. Given Taiwan’s new policies last week, though, that was starting to look like an untenable situation. What if you couldn’t come back after your next run, and that was due to happen in another 10 days? Where would you go with so many flights cancelled? What if your home country was Italy or Iran or the United States? Those visa-exempt expats aren’t even the largest population of foreigners in the country. That would be the migrant worker population of over 700,000 people, primarily caregivers and domestic workers from Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia. It’s possible that those workers if infected with COVID-19 would not choose to get care or come forward in time (thus putting more people in danger) if they were worried about being caught for overstaying their visa or working without papers; the National Immigration Agency currently estimate 48,000 plus of those migrant workers have overstayed. So the government also had to step in and make changes to their immigration policies, reinstating an amnesty program that softened penalties and fines to the minimum, and a day later, gave a 30-day extension to those who were caught in the situation of having to make another visa run. More kudos to the Taiwanese government for making these pragmatic changes.

Given all the news in Taiwan, the mood in Taipei is decidedly a weird mixture of the apocalyptic and nonchalant, not unlike what is going on in the United States. On Thursday, just after the border shutdown was announced, a friend warned me on Thursday not to go to Carrefour, our large local supermarket. “The scene in there might make you go into labor right away,” she joked dryly. We ended up going around 9:30 pm anyway, just before closing, to pick up a few staples. Toilet paper was pretty low, and the shelves of rice were half empty. Astonishingly, all the canned soups and beans were gone, as were instant noodles. While produce shelves were full of fruits and vegetables, the meat section was practically wiped out. On the other hand, on Saturday, Steve and I ventured downtown to a few destinations and found shockingly large amounts of people out in the parks, definitely not social distancing. While the 80-degree temperatures certainly encouraged hanging out outside and the risk of transmission is much lower in non-enclosed spaces, we were still surprised to see Huashan Creative Park full of people with many dogs, kids, and picnic blankets. After hitting up a yarn shop downtown, we made our way to Dadaocheng Wharf, thinking it’d be a nice outdoor place to have dinner from some of the boutique food trucks that have sprung up there in the past year, and we found a similar scene of hundreds of people mingling, few of them with face masks on. “Are these the same people who just filled their entire cart with twenty packs of instant noodles?” I asked Steve blankly. With a grimly set jaw, all Steve would say was that the next case was probably in the crowd in front of us. We left the park and took a taxi to a favorite pizza restaurant where we washed our hands and sprayed them with alcohol before eating, contemplating the mixed messages we were seeing this week.

Last week, Steve predicted that just as there was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11, there would be a before-COVID-19 and after-COVID-19. The best article I’ve seen so far that outlines what the future looks like is in MIT’s Technology Review: “We’re Not Going Back to Normal” (March 17, 2020). The silver lining is that it may lead to a better future, as Taiwan’s history has hinted. For the past four years, we have lived on this small island of 24 million people, which has had to become pretty darn scrappy in a constant fight for survival. Since 1949, Taiwan has faced the constant threat of annexation by force from China, and survived bombing crises and American derecognition, and become increasingly marginalized by the world. This constant vigilance against its larger neighbor has become a way of life here. I mean, this island still has an annual national air raid drill, when everyone has to stay off the street or risk a very hefty fine, which is something I’ve never experienced anywhere else. (I rode out last year’s in my favorite hot pot shop behind school.) That survival instinct is part of what has kept Taiwan alive and ready to respond. When in late December, Chinese social media started showing a buzz about a mysterious respiratory disease in Wuhan but then went dark quickly. Among other things, I think Taiwan picked up on that censorship and the fact that something might be going on in China. That helped them start fever screenings right away on flights to Taiwan from Wuhan on December 31, the same day that China informed the WHO there were cases of a severe, unknown pneumonia in Wuhan.

Meanwhile, in a place like the US, people keep writing articles with callbacks to the Spanish flu, to World War II, to the last time that the entire country mobilized around a single cause like this, instead of milling around aimlessly like insects. During a video call this weekend, a friend in Chicago stated soberly, “The United States is melting down.” What we’ve seen in the past two weeks with the worsening of situations in Europe and in the US makes me mortally afraid for the lives of people in the US and the lives of friends, family, and close acquaintances who are now doctors and nurses. We’ve stopped making plans three months out, after the birth of our child, or even six months out. Nothing seems so sure anymore. Previously rock-solid companies and organizations have wavered in the face of this disaster. It is incredibly difficult not to despair, however. California, New York, and Illinois only began enacting state-wide stay-at-home orders this week. It seems like authorities have just been dragging their feet, overly fearful of disrupting the economy or restricting travel (in this land of the free) that they have not been able to call for more swift and widespread action to save lives. We are incredibly grateful to be living in a country which takes health and such threats very seriously, with responsible and swift leadership at the helm, but what will happen to the country that we love when this is all over? What about our families? Who will be left? The future looks very uncertain to us. As articles repeatedly say, Taiwan has lessons to share with the rest of the world, but the US must first pull through this and be in a position to learn and change in the future. That is what seems up in the air right now.

This post brings us up to the present, just two months since the crisis began raging in Asia. As the situation changes in Taiwan, I hope to keep writing. For friends abroad, if this has been helpful to read, I hope you’ll also consider also writing down your story, with or without frequent citations to CDC press releases! As an inveterate blogger and note-keeper since fifth grade, I have always found it useful to write down my daily thoughts about small and big things happening in my life. I think we all realize now that this is a global event, something that all of us will look back on and remember where we were and how we got through it all together. Maybe it’s through a blog like this, or through art and poetry, or even through a family podcast. Perhaps we’ll reminisce in a better world where countries have learned how to become more resilient and robust, like Taiwan after SARS. Or perhaps we’ll recall these times while sitting in an apocalyptic wasteland toasting our dinner over an oil barrel fire. At the same time, misinformation and bad faith actors are pushing their agendas the world over, using this pandemic as an opportunity to seed doubt, fear, and hatred around the world. By writing my little bit of truth from my perspective to the best of my ability and preserving it for the rest of the world to see, I hope to combat that. You can too.

In Part 5, I write about what happened in Taiwan between March and May 2020, from domestic controls to loosening up and the subsiding of the first wave of the pandemic in Taiwan.

In Part 1, I write about Taiwan’s brush with SARS in 2002-03, the beginnings of the crisis in January, and Taiwan’s initial reactions that put us on a path to getting ahead of the virus.

Part 2:

Before going to bed on February 3, I checked my phone to see an important message sent from school administration to all parents. With a sinking feeling in my heart, I checked, and it was what we had suspected. On February 2, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education had issued a statement saying that the winter break for Taiwanese schools that was due to continue until February 11 would be extended two more weeks until February 25. Many people suspected that international schools like ours would follow suit, and this message confirmed it. We would have three more weeks of extended break, and students would keep up with classes through digital learning. (Also of note, the statement asked employers to provide leave for their employees so that at least one parent could take care of children if need be.)

In my private journal that night, I wrote: What is the new normal? It is face masks all over the place. It is quarantine and cabin fever at home. It is a long winter vacation and staring down at three more weeks of uncertainty. With all the feverish preparations going on around us, I had been looking forward to going back to work, with all its attendant schedules, activities, and some semblance of normalcy. While I was grateful for the chance to spend more time with Steve and Stella, I felt suddenly adrift and cut off from things. As someone who also mainly coordinates and plans events at her job, I was not sure about what the next few months would mean for all of the things we had been scheduling for the spring.

At the same time, Steve and I continued a conversation we had already begun about how to prepare for the worst situation with COVID-19. With a baby on the way and a dog in our family, Steve was on high alert, trying to figure out how to get ahead of this and how to make sure it didn’t impact us. The most dire scenario seemed like we needed to get the heck out of Asia. We could always get on a flight and fly back to the United States, where we would stay with Steve’s parents or my parents, but his more likely because it would mean we could be ensconced in the suburbs away from the busy city centers. How to get out of Taiwan with our dog though seemed like a bigger problem, because animals would probably have stricter quarantine regulations, and pets being abandoned in Wuhan was already presenting as a problem. We talked about that for a while before bringing the conversation down to earth. While the Taiwan CDC and CECC seemed to have things under control and cases were still in the single digits, we wanted to address a much more likely scenario: self-quarantine. The memory of SARS and self-quarantine were still fresh for other teachers at school, and we felt like that was much more of a possibility. While we probably wouldn’t get it if we were careful, we might be cooped up at home without the ability to go outside for a while. We needed to make preparations for that. So we made a long list of things that we thought we would need, like over the counter medications that we didn’t have at home, food and non-perishables that we would find it inconvenient to be without, and some dog medications and supplies that we also wanted. We called it our preparation list, and the next day, we headed to Costco to start beefing up on those items. Even if the worst didn’t happen, we would feel better being more prepared, and we would be able to use up all those supplies eventually. As the Disreputable Dog of Garth Nix’s Lirael would say, “It’s always better to be doing.”

I also wrote in my journal, In my condition, my parents have been calling and asking me to wear face masks. I have acquiesced, and even Steve notes warily that it may have been overly optimistic to go out and eat at hot pot and go to these markets where there’s just a ton of people. Even without the threat of coronavirus, we’re courting flu during this season for sure. This is basically what I mean – even though logically speaking the threat of getting sick is very minimal, and now we’re wearing face masks for anything where we are interacting with other humans (on the MRT, at the store) rather than just ourselves (walking the dog, mostly, or sitting in the park), it still feels psychologically distancing to follow the coronavirus online and at home, watching that red map expand over time, centered on a dark crimson-shaded silhouette of China. Everyone’s being cautious and preventative, but I’m hesitant to call it “overly cautious” now. In all of this, I feel our baby moving inside me. Kicking in the mornings, flutterings during the day, and reassuring me that all is well inside. The kicks are getting stronger, and despite feeling like I’ve got an octopus inside, it makes me smile so much to feel this new life. It is absolutely an amazing thing. I worry about keeping myself healthy, about keeping her healthy, about keeping all of us okay.

So Taipei was holding its breath, but things were due to take a darker turn soon. First, on February 6, Taiwan shut its borders with China, Macao, and Hong Kong. Our friends Henry and Camilla who were living in Hong Kong and had been planning on coming back to Taiwan for the impending birth of their first child had scrambled earlier that week to get an earlier flight back, and when the borders shut, it became clear that their snap decision was one of those decisions that seemed overcautious at first but was excellent in hindsight. It’s worth noting that shutting borders to certain countries, as Europe and the US are beginning to do now, is actually not the stringent ban that it seems to be. For example, you can’t prohibit a citizen of your own country from coming in – that’s what it means to be a citizen. So in this case, Taiwanese citizens like Camilla would have been able to come back. When it comes to Henry, that could have been a bigger question. In fact, a friend who had been traveling in Finland was worried that she wouldn’t be able to return to Taiwan if they transited through Hong Kong. Fortunately, it also became clear that foreigners who already had an Alien Residence Certificate would be allowed back in.

Then on February 7, the other shoe dropped. At dinner, our phones started buzzing simultaneously, evidence that there was a nationwide alert about something. Occasionally, such alerts are sent for typhoons or earthquakes to all cellphones within the area, so we weren’t too surprised, but the contents of this one was a surprise. It turned out that on January 31, the day when I went downtown for yarn and we had hot pot with a bunch of friends, was the day that the fateful Diamond Princess had docked in Keelung, Taipei’s main shipping port and the northernmost city in Taiwan. After the Diamond Princess docked in Yokohama and was found to be carrying COVID-19, Taiwanese officials had been busy tracing the past path of the boat, and found that though the carrier they believed to have infected the boat, a man from Hong Kong, had disembarked already on January 27, the rest of the passengers including some which may have had the virus took a day in Taipei. The text we had received came with a link to Google Maps, where they had recorded the cruise ship passenger itineraries, and depressingly seemed to contain absolutely every single tourist hotspot in the north. With this one move, COVID-19 seemed to be at our front doors. Steve was grimly satisfied that his prediction about the dangers of hot pot seemed to be justified, even if no one had seemed to catch it from this event yet, but this was the spark that fanned the flames of panic in Taipei. January 31 was still the New Year holiday, and most of Taipei’s population had probably been out and about in these locations. A week had already passed, but everyone who had been in those locations anytime between 6:30 am to 5 pm (probably the time that the Diamond Princess was in harbor) was asked to self-monitor their health for the next week until February 14, when the 14-day incubation period for the virus would have passed. My LINE messages from that time record worried back and forth messages with Donna, whose sister had already flown back to the US, and was worried about burning through her sick leave by going home since they had gotten a foot massage that day near one of those locations. I myself had gone to the yarn store just a few blocks away, but thankfully had been wearing at least my cloth mask that whole time.

Three weeks had seemed like a boring eternity to me, and I had idly wondered whether it would be a good idea or not to take a long weekend in Yilan or the south of the island. Now it was coming home to us that the virus was right here in the city, and that it would probably be a good idea to go absolutely nowhere in general. Steve even stopped going as often to his co-working spot just fifteen minutes away because it would mean getting on the public transit more often. Instead, we started taking long walks at night on the riverbanks with Stella. With my expanding belly, I was getting restless at home, but at night in the open air, with a slight breeze, it felt good to stretch my legs and walk for hours. This was the main way we spent time outside in the subsequent few weeks. Occasionally, we made trips to dinner or lunch with a few friends (scrupulously keeping our distance from those who had just gotten back from travel abroad), but more often, we made lunch and dinner at home. Fortunately, the time passed more quickly than I had expected, and with the number of cases continuing to increase linearly (instead of exponentially), the mood was tense but not panicky. When we met with friends or went out, we joked about how great it was to be able to get our house in order, do many loads of laundry, and get as much sleep as we wanted. Even for my friends who had switched to digital learning and online teaching, their first class was usually at 9 am, more than an hour later than usual. So though people complained about spending more of their day in front of a computer, it was not as bad as it could have been. I think the most sympathy had to be given to parents, who were doing their best to entertain and to cope with their young children. While at our school, there were continuing lessons and classes being conducted digitally, many parents I knew were trying to take it one day at a time and not be run ragged by the prospect of being at home for so long with everyone. Fortunately, school still provided a little bit of structure, allowing children to devote themselves to particular subjects throughout the day. I even heard from some friends that this provided a silver lining for their student engagement; some quieter students wrote more on discussion boards than they would raise their hands and say in class. Also, instead of spacing out for a 80-minute class, students were spending 40 minutes doing timed writing exercises, and overall devoting more energy to doing their work than they would perhaps have in class, not that they’d admit to such!

The crazy thing that I took away about COVID-19 was that astonishingly quickly, the new normal took hold, and it became incredibly hard for me to remember what life had been like before this. It was a part of every single conversation I had with friends or parents, Skype calls originally scheduled to update them about the progress of my pregnancy. It just became overwhelmingly the only topic of conversation. When we met up with school friends for drinks one night, the conversation revolved around digital learning, quarantine, and not heck of a lot else. When I looked at Instagram photos from the past few months or watched videos of bloggers walking around Taipei (one of Steve’s favorite things to look at on YouTube), I marveled that not everyone was wearing a face mask, and that people were just mingling around in these crowded spaces without any hint of fear. It seemed like a more innocent time already.

At the same time, we were also learning what consumer panic and supply shortages could look like. On February 8, Taiwan English News reported massive toilet paper sales in Taiwan. Rumors had spread that the increase on demand for raw material used to make face masks would mean that a lower supply of raw material for toilet paper and other paper products. Besides being patently false because toilet paper is made to dissolve in water, and masks need to stand up to some moisture, it was later discovered that the rumor/ social media messages were started by some people who actually worked in the industry and whether erroneously or willfully believed it could be used to their advantage. Taiwan’s been through toilet paper panics before, and fortunately, we were fully stocked even before this thanks to our penchant for being “preppers”, as Steve calls it. However, it made us realize that the true danger did not solely lie in contracting COVID-19. The atmosphere of fear, paranoia, and apprehension made people susceptible to all kinds of groupthink. While we were not in danger of running out of anything in particular, we could easily create our own problems because of ignorance and fear. In response, the Taiwanese government stepped up fines for spreading rumors about COVID-19 to a maximum of NT $3 million (USD $100,000).

Overall, all signs pointed to the Taiwanese government continuing to take this crisis very seriously. The CECC was continuing to work overtime, tracing the contacts of those who had tested positive. Every day, the Taiwan CDC would put out two to three press releases told us how many people were tracked, tested, and put on home quarantine or cleared to go about their daily lives, like this one from February 10. Chen Shih-Chung, the minister of health and welfare who was also the head of the CECC, was basically becoming everyone’s favorite politician. He held daily press conferences and was said to have rushed to attending one after working all night welcoming back a chartered flight of Taiwanese nationals who were returning from Wuhan. His popularity has soared so much during Taiwan’s handling of the entire COVID-19 outbreak that the public is spontaneously paying tribute to him already. Steve was quoting him constantly, and fond of referring to the fact that the current vice-president was an epidemiologist by training.

At the same time, digital tools were being made available to the public to help them handle the crisis. Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister, announced on February 6 at the same time that masks were starting to be rationed a platform to help track face mask supplies. Many apps and maps were being made to track face mask rationing so that the public could identify and visit the pharmacies which still had masks in stock. We used https://coronavirus.app/taiwan to find the ones closest to our house.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t note how worried I was during this phase about anti-Asian sentiment. Several times in February, I shared Facebook articles with friends about the wave of xenophobia that Asians were facing around the world. Children were being bullied in school, people were being beat up in public in Europe, Chinatown restaurants were feeling the lack of business all over the United States, and microaggressions of a million different sorts were being reported all over the world. Imagine how hurtful it was for people to move away from you at the sight of you, for those people to start berating you for wearing a face mask, for people to get up if you sat down next to them. This happened in Europe before there was a single case declared. Here, it is impossible for people in Taiwan to shy away from others on the basis of looking like they were from mainland China. Until you open your mouth (and maybe sometimes afterwards), there’s just no way to know. Everyone’s behind a face mask anyway. But it pained me to see how racism and xenophobia were running rampant elsewhere in the world, given new free rein by the appearance of COVID-19.

Overall, I was feeling pretty ragged. On February 26, I wrote in my private journal, Feeling the baby move is a genuinely great feeling, and would make these days a transport of delight if it were not for the stress of the coronavirus outbreak and the pressure of making decisions, buying things, figuring out where to live. For the past few weeks, my lower left eyelid has been twitching constantly, a reminder that low-level background stress is permeating throughout my life. Maybe an exciting part of becoming a parent… maybe this epidemic which has killed a lot of people already is waiting in the background to pounce. Next week, we will return to school, but I’ve already been called in for a “fever screening training” to make sure we can take the temperatures for everyone coming into school. Steve’s good friends Andrew and Erin, who were planning to come in about a month for spring break, are probably not coming, because everyone in the US is afraid of coronavirus. They’re slightly more concerned about ending up in quarantine afterwards, but it’s really hard to convey how with spring coming, green leaves and sunlight on the trees, with rising temperatures and more folks out of doors not wearing as many face masks, the fear of contagion is more a fear than anything else. It’s really hard to convey that. We don’t know yet what will happen, but the fear of the unknown and the uncertainty when planning further out… it is a very difficult thing to deal with.

In Part 3, I write about going back to school, watching the COVID-19 situation explode in Europe and the US, and why US higher education has made an epic mistake.

For the past two months, our lives have been turned kind of upside down just like the lives of everyone else living in Asia. The novel coronavirus, also now known as COVID-19, exploded onto the scene at the same time as Lunar New Year. In this time, it has gone from a mild concern to a full-fledged wildfire, rampaging through our lives, to a less urgent but still vital issue, as we watch the same waves that passed through East Asia begin to reverberate through the US. We’ve realized now that this is shaping up to be one of the biggest incidents in our lifetime, and seeing what is happening to our friends and family in the US makes us want to help and speak up somehow. I think one of the only places to start is by chronicling how we’ve seen it so far.

Part 1:

Though it seems like a bit of an exaggeration, our story really starts more than 15 years ago. While I was still in high school, the SARS outbreak in East Asia of 2002-2003 left an enduring mark on Taiwan. Thousands in Asia were sickened, and Taiwan had more than 70 deaths. Friends who were in Taiwan at that time had school canceled early, and went without their graduation ceremony in May. Old-timers at our school talked about the quarantine procedure that happened because some parents had gotten it, and one of them died. They shut down the school, and made sure that everyone stayed at home for two weeks, checking on them daily with visits in hazmat suits, handing them lunchboxes to make sure they didn’t have any reasons to go outside. Overall, more than 150,000 people were placed on a strict quarantine by the government. After SARS, the Taiwanese developed a habit of wearing face masks quite often if anyone exhibits symptoms of a respiratory illness. More importantly, the government made several changes, including instituting the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), which is an agency that would be activated in times of crisis, and headed up by the Minister of Public Health. It would have emergency powers and be the central decision maker about closing schools, businesses, and instituting emergency measures.

Fast forward to 2020. In mid-January, we started hearing about a mysterious disease in Wuhan, China. It barely registered with me when I heard that my dad was leaving Shanghai a few days early for New Year’s break, but it ended up being a huge boon that he got out of China on January 17. On January 21, Taiwan CDC reported their first case of the coronavirus, a Taiwanese businesswoman who had just traveled back from Wuhan, and on January 22, the CECC was activated and already hard at work making sure that face masks would be available, even though the week-long New Year’s vacation had just started. By the time New Year’s break started here on January 25, the result was that Taiwan was already on high alert. I reassured my parents that we would be fine, but on January 26, when we went to Shilin Night Market for a walk, Steve and I were both taken back that we were the only ones in sight on the MRT or in the night market not wearing a face mask. In any given day in Taiwan, a handful of people on the train or bus are always wearing a face mask. It’s a polite thing to do if you have a cold or are suffering from allergy symptoms, because people will look at you askance if you sneeze, cough, or show a runny nose. The idea is: why aren’t you protecting other people by putting some cautionary measures in place if you want to be sick or look sick and still be in public transport? That week, we started playing a game, which was to see how many people we could count who were not wearing face masks on public transit. It usually ended up being 5 to 7 people, two of which were ourselves.

While I’m generally a little more burned out on the news cycle and staying away from the phones, Steve started voraciously reading everything he could about the newest cases, and decided it was time for us to start getting some preventative measures. First, we started walking around trying to figure out where we could buy face masks, hand sanitizer, or rubbing alcohol. Though this was only late January, we were already pretty late on the ball. Most places were sold out or only getting very occasional shipments. One afternoon, we saw a line outside Cosmed, a CVS-type of store, and I jumped in line without being able to figure out what was exactly being sold. Fortunately, it was face masks, and I got a pack of 5 purple masks, because we were only able to buy one pack per person. However, alcoholic wipes, hand sanitizer, and rubbing alcohol were nowhere to be found, even though we walked everywhere. On January 27, we received emails from school saying the New Year break would be extended for three days, and we would go back to school on February 6, not February 3. Many families had probably taken the break time to travel to China, Hong Kong, and other places where the coronavirus seemed to be more prevalent, and this would give us a little bit of breathing room to make sure that if people showed symptoms, they would not come to school.

By the time it was Steve’s birthday on January 30, we had gotten a hold of some masks, both cloth ones that are usually worn for people who are on scooters, and paper ones. The next day on January 31, we were scheduled to go to hot pot downtown with our friends Matt, Donna, Donna’s sister who was visiting from the US, and Jeff. That morning, I made a trip downtown while wearing my cloth mask to buy some yarn from one of the only stores that sells it. While heading downtown for the hot pot, Steve mentally wondered if this was the wrong move. Even in good times, he’s convinced that hot pot is just a terrible disease vector, as are most all you can eat buffets where many people are coming by and using the same handles to get condiments and drinks and desserts. So though it was a delicious dinner, Steve had his misgivings, which were entirely proven to be true a few days later.

On January 30, the CECC was starting to institute a 3-mask per person limit to be dispensed through convenience stores and other small marts. We only succeeded in buying some face masks after staking out the local 7-11 and being told that the delivery truck comes around midnight. So at midnight, we walked downstairs and around the corner to get our three per person, which were packaged in these little plastic baggies. That still constitutes half of the face mask supply we have at home!

On February 4, the CECC introduced another measure limiting face masks. Instead of being dispensed through convenience stores, only government-sanctioned pharmacies would have masks, and you could buy two at a time, once per week. They would track people via their National Health Insurance cards; for foreigners who didn’t have NHI, they would be tracked through their passport number. Moreover, each store would only be given 200 face masks per day. At the same time, Taiwan was ramping up mask production. By the end of the New Year’s holiday, there were millions of masks being produced every single day, and the majority of them was going to hospitals and other locales where they were hoping to build up at least a two-week supply if a large wave of patients hit.

The measure seemed to us like a severe overreaction at the time, but in a theme that would repeat time and time again in the next two months, measures that seemed like an overreaction turned out to be made exactly in time and to the correct extent. We were learning that in order to keep it in control, you had to get ahead of the virus.

In Part 2, I write about the extended school closure in February, voluntary self-distancing, and the Diamond Princess.