Taiwan in 2022: An Eventful Year

Taiwan had an eventful year in 2022. Cross-Strait tensions increased dramatically after Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taipei. China's belligerent actions in response have invited international condemnation and triggered more official engagements between Taiwan and the global community. Amid this tension, Taiwan continued its democratic governance by holding local elections in November. A change in COVID policy led to a surge in cases, but the initial high death rate had declined by the end of the year, thanks to high inoculation rates. In a global economic slowdown, Taiwan outperformed its neighboring countries. With Beijing's alignment to Moscow after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the close US–Taiwan relationship further strengthened.

Challenges of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Experiences from South Korea and Taiwan.

The coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has dramatically disrupted the global community, causing more than 6 million deaths worldwide and changing daily lifestyles for billions. Two Asian countries, South Korea and Taiwan, have been able to maintain low rates of infections and fatality. Five articles are collected in this special section to examine their successful experiences and the challenges they faced.

A Survey on Data-driven COVID-19 and Future Pandemic Management

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in more than 440 million confirmed cases globally and almost 6 million reported deaths as of March 2022. Consequently, the world experienced grave repercussions to citizens' lives, health, wellness, and the economy. In responding to such a disastrous global event, countermeasures are often implemented to slow down and limit the virus's rapid spread. Meanwhile, disaster recovery, mitigation, and preparation measures have been taken to manage the impacts and losses of the ongoing and future pandemics. Data-driven techniques have been successfully applied to many domains and critical applications in recent years. Due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of pandemic management, researchers have proposed and developed data-driven techniques across various domains. However, a systematic and comprehensive survey of data-driven techniques for pandemic management is still missing. In this article, we review existing data analysis and visualization techniques and their applications for COVID-19 and future pandemic management with respect to four phases (namely, Response, Recovery, Mitigation, and Preparation) in disaster management. Data sources utilized in these studies and specific data acquisition and integration techniques for COVID-19 are also summarized. Furthermore, open issues and future directions for data-driven pandemic management are discussed.

Taiwan in 2021: The Looming China Threat

China heightened its military pressure on Taiwan, but president Tsai In-wen defiantly resisted Beijing’s coercion and overcame domestic criticism. With a cooperative public and international support, Taipei quelled an unexpected COVID-19 outbreak. The bullish economy continues to be fueled by global demand for Taiwan’s technology products as the Taipei–Washington relationship progresses advantageously.

COVID-19 and the Anatomy of the Rally Effect in Taiwan

Research has shown that major international events can produce a “rally ’round the flag” effect that boosts citizens’ support for an American president. This study examines such an effect in Taiwan, when the country was confronted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that citizens who previously disapproved of the president did become more likely to gather around their leader. The public’s support was contingent on the president’s ability to handle the crisis. This is one of the few studies on this effect conducted outside the US, and its findings represent a significant step toward broadening the scope of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Gastronomica is the property of University of California Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The dynamics of cross-boundary fire-Financial contagion between the oil and stock markets

Motivated by the complex dynamics between the oil and stock markets, this study develops a dynamic Markov regime switching-copula-extreme value theory model to quantitatively investigate financial contagion and its characteristics between these two markets. The proposed model is applied to daily returns on crude oil prices and the stock markets in the United States and China over six major extreme downside risk events. We find that financial contagion is shorter, stronger, and more susceptible to extreme downside shocks in the United States than in China. In addition, the COVID-19 crisis shows the largest financial contagion compared with previous crises.

Metabolic associated fatty liver disease increases coronavirus disease 2019 disease severity in nondiabetic patients

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has attracted increasing worldwide attention. While diabetes is known to aggravate COVID-19 severity, it is not known whether nondiabetic patients with metabolic dysfunction are also more prone to more severe disease. The association of metabolic associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) with COVID-19 severity in nondiabetic patients was investigated here. METHODS: The study cohort comprised 65 patients with (i.e. cases) and 65 patients without MAFLD (i.e. controls). Each case was randomly matched with one control by sex (1:1) and age (+/-5 years). The association between the presence of MAFLD (as exposure) and COVID-19 severity (as the outcome) was assessed by binary logistic regression analysis. RESULTS: In nondiabetic patients with COVID-19, the presence of MAFLD was associated with a four-fold increased risk of severe COVID-19;the risk increased with increasing numbers of metabolic risk factors. The association with COVID-19 severity persisted after adjusting for age, sex, and coexisting morbid conditions. CONCLUSION: Health-care professionals caring for nondiabetic patients with COVID-19 should be cognizant of the increased likelihood of severe COVID-19 in patients with MAFLD.

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural poverty and policy responses in China

Given the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a timely study on the impacts of and policy response to the pandemic on rural poverty in China is critically important because China has aimed to completely eradicate extreme poverty by the end of 2020. This paper uses data from the latest round of a nationally representative household panel survey to examine the impacts of the pandemic on rural poverty in China. Our data show that 11.9% of sample households were ever officially registered as poor households between 2013 and 2019, and this poverty incidence fell to 2.7% by the end of 2019. In the middle February of 2020, 23% of the households who have graduated from poverty since 2013 perceived that they would fall back into poverty due to the COVID-19. Among those never poor households, 7.1% perceived that they would possibly fall into poverty due to the pandemic. Results from both descriptive and multivariate analyses consistently show the interruptions that the pandemic caused in off-farm employment is an important channel that led households to perceive of falling back into or falling into poverty. We also find households in the bottom four quintiles when ranked in terms of household income per capita are much more likely to perceive themselves of falling back into or falling into poverty during this pandemic than those in the richest quintile. Meanwhile, our results show that the education and age of household heads, as well as being from Hubei Province matter in explaining household perception about falling back into or falling into poverty in some cases but not all. The paper concludes with a set of policy responses that China has taken to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on poverty alleviation.