Taiwan has been successful in suppressing the highly infectious Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19) despite its proximity to Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus first emerged in December 2019. Taiwan recorded 517 coronavirus cases and 7 deaths in contrast to the similarly sized population of Australia, which confirmed 27,133 cases and 894 deaths as of 3 October 2020 (Johns Hopkins n.d.). Journalists across the world have attributed Taiwan’s success against COVID-19 to its experience fighting Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 (Fortune 2020; CNN 2020). “The secret of Taiwan’s success,” a Turkish journalist argued, “lies in the painful memories of the 2003 outbreak” of SARS (Anadolu Agency 2020). Yet, these journalists have found it difficult to elaborate on Taiwan’s learning from its SARS experiences in the format of a newspaper article. Drawing on historian Virginia Berridge’s (2018) approach in writing a policy-orientated contemporary history of medicine, this article shows how Taiwan centralized antipandemic measures, resolved the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and challenged the World Health Organization (WHO) and China’s state medical advisories to fight COVID-19. Just as Taiwan adopted these same measures to redress SARS-era issues, Taiwan’s COVID-19 actions could serve as global health lessons for other countries fighting the current and future pandemics.
