C. Jason Wang, a Stanford professor who has studied Taiwan’s COVID-19 response, similarly told me that the SARS outbreak was seared into “the psyche of the Taiwanese people.” Especially distressing were scenes such as the quarantining of an entire hospital for weeks in 2003. Seventy-three people died, which Wang said registers in a small country such as Taiwan. In its aftermath, the government created a National Health Command Center and, like South Korea, empowered authorities to track people and control the production of vital medical supplies during an epidemic.

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Wang noted that the command center, which he described as essentially 100 people in a bunker continuously coordinating information from central and local governments, was activated on January 20 of this year, even before the first coronavirus case in Taiwan was confirmed. Well before that, at the end of December, when the World Health Organization was still looking into a mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan, China, Taiwanese authorities were boarding planes and checking passengers on direct flights from the city for pneumonia symptoms. Within weeks officials had cut off travel from Wuhan and were tracking cellphones to make sure those who had been quarantined were staying at home.

The Trump administration acted far less expeditiously. When China began confining many millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that this was serious, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me. “We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.”

Taiwan, which also confirmed its first coronavirus case within a day of America’s, currently has more than 200 confirmed cases, compared with more than 50,000 in the U.S. This is all the more remarkable given, as Wang and his co-authors note in their article, that “Taiwan is 81 miles off the coast of mainland China and was expected to have the second highest number of cases of [COVID-19] due to its proximity to and number of flights between China.”

Taiwan, a territory that neighboring China claims as its own, and South Korea, which is threatened by North Korea, are also far more accustomed than the United States to existential danger lurking nearby. “Given that Taiwan has faced everything from its giant neighbor—the spreading of fake news, military threats, the withholding of vital medical information during the SARS outbreak in 2003—the country knows it must be on its fullest guard whenever any major problem emerges in China,” the Taiwan-based journalist Hilton Yip recently wrote in Foreign Policy.

Wang, for example, pointed out that Taiwan has a vice premier who doubles as the country’s chief information-security officer because of the constant threat of Chinese cyberattacks. When coronavirus descended on the country, this official was able to integrate the state’s immigration and customs database with its national health-insurance database and use big-data analytics in real time so that, “when somebody got off the airplane from Wuhan and went to see a doctor, the doctor would get an alert saying ‘this person just came from Wuhan.’”