A friend called me yesterday and among other things we were talking about, she asked me, “so where is Taiwan and why is my husband so annoyed!?”

Deep breath.😔

Here’s the five minute version of what I told her.

Taiwan is an island on the South China Sea about 110 miles from southeastern China.

People are talking about Taiwan because their health authorities told the WHO (World Health Organization) on December 31, 2019, a month before the rest of the world heard about it, that there were human-to-human contacts in a pneumonia-type virus in Wuhan, China. Unfortunately, the WHO dismissed the information for another month. What a different world we’d be in if they had paid attention to Taiwan!! So why does the WHO, the UN, China, and all but 15 nations, ignore Taiwan?

Well, it goes back to the end of World War II. The war morphed into a Civil War between Mao Zedong’s communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (Nationalists) which had been fighting on and off since the 1920s. Toward the end of 1947, as Mao’s army seized large swaths of the country, the Nationalists gradually began to fall back toward the island nation, sometimes called Formosa. By 1949, what was left of the Nationalists fled across the South China Sea to Taiwan.

Interestingly, Taiwan, whose official name is the Republic of China, was one of the initial founders of the United Nations. It was ejected from that body in 1971 and replaced by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) because it had become a super-power. The PRC is still trying to take over Taiwan. Only 15 nations, including the United States, recognized Taiwan. The US, in particular, continues to try to include Taiwan in agencies of the UN, particularly the WHO. China, believing that Taiwan is simply one of their provinces, refused to allow it to participate at all. However, there was a bit of a thaw in 2009 when Taiwan got Observer Status as long as they allowed the WHO to call Taiwan either the ‘Taiwanese Province of China” or “Chinese Taipei.” That lasted until Taiwan’s 2016 elections, when President Thai Ing-wen took office and categorically refuses to discuss the same “one country, two systems” like that in Hong Kong.

When, on December 31, 2019, Taipei (capital of Taiwan) sent information to the WHO that they understood that the virus in China was a human-to-human issue, the WHO never even returned Taiwan’s call. However, Taiwan remembered the 2003 SARS epidemic and decided not to wait. By that evening they were already screening, testing and contract tracing anyone coming in to Taiwan from Wuhan, China. Yet it wasn’t until January 21 that China finally told the WHO that there was human-to-human contact—though they insisted that they had things under control. Ten days later, the US imposed the first bans of travel from China.

So it boils down to the fact that your husband is “annoyed” because the WHO followed China’s lead, rather than even looking into Taiwan’s information🤯Despite that, Taiwan has consistently provided all its information to the WHO and other countries, and has shared what it learned from SARS, and any current data, with the other 184 nations struggling with the Covid-19 virus.