Ron Hanson

Guest writer

Ron Hanson is editor of the international arts magazine White Fungus. Launched in Wellington in 2004, the magazine has been based in Taiwan since 2009 but maintains coverage of New Zealand arts and culture.

A masked man at a bus stop in Taipei (Photo: Frankie Chang)

Taiwan’s Covid response was once the envy of the world. What went wrong?

Taiwan kept up its vigilance for more than a year, but sure enough, complacency crept in. And then so did Covid.

By Ron Hanson | 2nd June, 2021

A street food market in the Taiwanese city of Keelung on the evening of June 9, 2020, after Covid-19 rules were eased (Photo: Lin Yen Ting/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Amid all NZ’s Covid back-patting, let’s not forget the country that did it first

New Zealand has been lauded for its response to Covid-19, but the fastest country to act was Taiwan, which has gone 57 days without a new locally-transmitted case. So why has it been overlooked?

By Ron Hanson | 17th June, 2020