Just to be clear, Taiwan did not have huge flows of mainland Chinese soon after the outbreak though. They closed the border to all travelers with PRC passports in mid-February. They did take some drastic measures that have worked.
Mid-February was already weeks after the epidemic starts to be on the news. They also repatriated businessmen from China. Given business and cultural ties between the two countries, I find hard to believe that less Chinese traveled between them than between China and Italia.
> They closed the border to all travelers with PRC passports in mid-February
And before that they had plenty of people coming in from China with active Covid infections - returning from New Year including people from Hubei.
The US enacted their travel ban to China on 31st Jan, yet that hasn’t helped the US...
Now Taiwan is getting cases from other countries (returning citizens and foreign migrant workers) e.g. yesterday: “Meanwhile, the 15 patients deemed to have contracted COVID-19 overseas all returned to Taiwan in the period March 16-23. The countries they had visited were the U.S., the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Spain, Malaysia, Monaco and Mexico.”
Taiwan is still allowing foreign migrant workers to enter the country, as they need them for their economy.
To add to that. mainland China banned citizens from traveling to Taiwan as individual tourists 2019 July because of other reasons. So yes Taiwan did not have huge flows of mainland Chinese.
But they did, for business. There are also millions of Taiwanese that either live or work in the PRC. Taiwan was one of the major international destinations for flights from Hubei and not coincidentally one of the first countries with cases outside China.
