Coronavirus anxiety over by July for vaccinated nations: Taiwanese Covid guru Chen Chien-jen

Highly vaccinated countries, including Australia, will be ‘turning down our worry about Covid-19’ within months, Taiwan’s pandemic guru says.

‘Covid is not the Covid of before. We already have good defences,’ says former Taiwanese vice-president Chen Chien-jen. Picture- Rosaline Walters

No one has more successfully battled deadly coronaviruses than Chen Chien-jen, Taiwan’s former vice-president.

So when the Johns Hopkins-trained epidemiologist says by “June or July” people in highly vaccinated places including Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Europe and North America will be ready “for turning down our worry about Covid-19”, it is a message delivered with authority.

“Covid is not the Covid of before. We already have good defences,” Professor Chen says from in his office at Taipei’s Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s peak research centre.

In 2003, Chen was dubbed Taiwan’s “SARS hero” after he as health minister thwarted the lethal virus first detected in China’s south.

In 2020, Chen – then in his final months as vice-president – was lauded as Taiwan’s “weapon against corona­virus” as he co-ordinated the world’s best response to the new foe from Wuhan.

Now he has advised his former boss, President Tsai Ing-wen, that Taiwan’s high vaccination levels – just below Australia’s – mean it can relax many Covid restrictions he helped put in place.

“After this Chinese New Year festival, maybe we will loosen,” he says.

Taiwan and Australia had been more similar than most countries during the two years of the pandemic.

Not anymore.

On Wednesday, Australia reported more than 50,000 domestic cases. Taiwan found 46.

Chen, a big fan of Oxford University’s Our World in Data website, says he still has a lot of confidence in Australia.

“The reason for that is your vaccination rate is high.”

Most of Australia’s recent cases – including Chen’s friend Malcolm Turnbull (“a very nice person, very energetic”) – have been of the less deadly, more infectious Omicron strand.

Australia’s current situation is increasingly like the health scenario Chen predicted in February 2020 with Covid-19 becoming like the flu: highly infectious but rarely lethal.

“For those who receive the two doses of the immunisation … most of them are asymptomatic, or have minor symptoms … sore throat, sneezing and coughing, and so forth,” he says.

Having learned lessons from its deadly encounter with SARS, Taiwan’s government, public health institutions and population were better prepared than anyone else in the world when the Wuhan strand emerged in late 2019.

Following Chen’s instructions, Taiwan screened passengers from Hubei and isolated people with virus symptoms before any other government.

Taiwan’s 24 million citizens understood the importance of mask-wearing for reducing the spread of the infectious disease.

And local manufacturing capacity meant it had enough masks to protect its entire population. They even had a surplus to donate to other countries, including Australia.

Life in Taiwan has been – by almost every measure, according to Our World in Data – better than anywhere in the world for the past two years.

Along with Australia and New Zealand, Taiwan is in a group where the mortality rate has decreased during the pandemic.

Taiwan’s economic statistics are another outlier. It was a rare economy that grew in 2020.

In 2021, Taiwan’s economy expanded by 6 per cent – buoyed by huge global demand for the world’s most sophisticated semiconductor chips, a product it dominates.

School attendance has been even more impressive. Aside from a few weeks in mid-2021 during its single significant outbreak, Taiwanese children – wearing child-size face masks without any fuss – have been learning in person for the whole pandemic.

Taiwan also never had a blunt, citywide lockdown, a health measure Dr Chen says leads to ­“fatigue” with other measures.

“For too many people, they are unnecessarily locked out.”

Taiwan has instead practised “precision intervention” with a contact-tracing outfit so good it was able to stop a major outbreak of the Delta strand.

It also has another weapon, which The Australian has observed since moving to Taipei last August: its people.

“I always said the successful containment of Covid-19 in Taiwan was based on two things: good governance and good citizenship,” says Chen.

Put together, Taiwan’s restrictions have been ranked by Our World in Data as far less strict than Australia, New Zealand, and even the US, for almost the entire pandemic.

Face masks remain ubiquitous – but schools are full, domestic travel is busy and many restaurants are booked out weeks in advance.

It is partly why many Taiwanese want its two week quarantine hotel regime to remain for international arrivals.

Having helped effect the world’s most impressive Covid containment set-up, Chen now sees it as his mission to nudge Taiwan into the pandemic’s next, less scary phase.

“I always try my best to convince people in Taiwan, if you’ve got the two doses or three doses of the vaccine, then you’re going to live with the virus. Don’t worry about that.”

Last year, he published a children’s book on the history of infectious diseases.

“Education of the people, definitely, is very important. To let the people know you don’t need to be panicked.”

Hand sanitiser dispensers won’t be packed away just yet. Nor will face masks, which have been key to limiting the reproduction rate of Covid in Taiwan.

Despite two years of gloomy health headlines, Chen – a practising Catholic – speaks optimistically about the legacy of the pandemic.

He tells his grandchildren, and his young readers, that they are lucky to live in a world equipped with better medicine and diagnostic tools than at any time in human history.

Public health experts and governments around the world are trying to learn from Taiwan’s extraordinary success.

“It gives me optimism,” he says. “The entire world can be changed, as long as we have the will to change it.”