Taiwan is now ranked 44th in the world in Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking. The updated ranking of “the best and worst places to be” during the pandemic was released Tuesday.
Taiwan dropped from its earlier ranking of 5th in the world to 15th in May when its domestic outbreak broke out. This month, it has dropped further to 44th. Taiwan’s low vaccination rate, recent outbreak and soft lockdown led to its sharp decline in the rankings.
The global ranking looks at four elements: people covered by vaccines, lockdown severity, flight capacity and vaccinated travel routes. At the time of the ranking calculations, Taiwan only had 4% of its people vaccinated. Currently, about 8% in Taiwan have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Taiwan’s fortunes are similar to other countries in the Asia-Pacific such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia in that these places performed well earlier, but their "zero-tolerance approach to small virus flare ups limit their ability to reopen.”
The United States, New Zealand and Switzerland top the list as the best places to be right now. The US and Europe have seen some of the highest mortality rates during the pandemic but they have been able to recover faster than most of the world due to their robust vaccine supplies.
Daily case numbers in Taiwan’s current outbreak are declining and it is awaiting the delivery of many of the vaccines it has ordered from abroad. It ordered 5.05 million Moderna vaccines and two batches of 150,000 and 240,000 have already arrived. Another batch of 410,000 is due to arrive Wednesday afternoon.
Taiwan was also fortunate to receive a donation of 2.5 million Moderna vaccines from the United States and donations of 2.24 million AstraZeneca vaccines from Japan.
Amidst the vaccine shortage, private entities such as TSMC and Foxconn Founder Terry Gou's YongLin Foundation are trying to procure 5 million BioNTech vaccines each for Taiwan from Germany. The government says that China had blocked a deal earlier this year to buy 5 million doses of BioNTech and has now authorized these entities to buy them on behalf of the nation.