Taiwan learning to live with record COVID cases, as mainland China continues strict controls

Billed a COVID-19 success story as its economy boomed through the pandemic, Taiwan is now battling a record wave of infections as it eases restrictions that had kept outbreaks at bay to start life with the virus.

For the whole of 2021, Taiwan reported less than 15,000 locally transmitted cases. Now, it’s registering around 80,000 cases a day — a startling reversal after the effectiveness of its long-standing zero-COVID policy won it international praise.

“We could no longer achieve the goal of zero COVID because it was too contagious,” former vice-president Chen Chien-jen, an epidemiologist, said in a video released by the