End of the Covid miracle? Taiwan registers ten thousand new infections

Globally, Taiwan was long considered a paragon of Covid. For more than two years, the democratic island republic had kept the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic at bay and, despite several local outbreaks of the Alpha, Delta and Omicron variants of the virus, had repeatedly managed to push the number of new infections to zero. Unlike its neighbor, the People’s Republic of China, it also managed this without severe restrictions on everyday life and personal freedoms. A poster child for many proponents of a zero-covid strategy – even in Europe. However, in the third year of the pandemic, the latest variant, Omicron BA.2, now appears to have breached Taiwan’s defenses.