Taiwan sits just 81 miles from the coast of China, more than 800,000 of its citizens live there and hundreds of daily connecting flights normally service business travel and tourism, but it has defied predictions of a widespread coronavirus outbreak and kept infection rates to just 44 isolated cases.

As nearby Japan and South Korea reel with thousands of infections, experts say Taiwan, an island of 23 million, has kept the virus at bay through early intervention, a slick command structure, well-rehearsed epidemic strategy and transparent communication that other countries including the UK could learn from.

By late December, before the coronavirus was on the world’s radar, Taiwan’s government was already sensing danger from rumours of a new respiratory disease emerging from Wuhan, and officials began boarding flights to check the health of passengers from the Chinese city.

Taipei began to block flights from China and quarantine people from infected zones before other Asian capitals chose to do so, and Taiwan’s Centres for Disease Control issue daily updates and regular warnings about the locations infected Covid-19 patients visited before their diagnosis.