Sign up for VoxCare’s coronavirus newsletter

With the coronavirus, or Covid-19, situation such as it is, we know readers really want to know about this outbreak and get answers to their questions.

So we are launching a new edition of our health care newsletter, VoxCare, covering the crisis. We will bring in reporting from other Vox reporters, share charts and tables to help make sense of the situation, answer readers’ questions, and more.

Sign up for it right here:

Expect us in your inboxes on most weekday afternoons and let us know what questions you have.

The first edition of the newsletter is a good idea of what to expect. I took a look at one big question: Why are other countries doing better than the United States with the coronavirus?

My colleague Kelsey Piper spoke with Standard University professor Jason Wang, who has studied Taiwan. Taiwan is doing a better job of testing people, and despite many visitors from mainland China, its outbreak is limited to 45 cases so far. And only one death.

Taiwan has a single-payer program​. It also has a single electronic medical records system. I asked Shou-Hsia Cheng, a health policy professor I met in Taipei, over email what the country had done to mitigate the virus.

His response:

Taiwanese health authorities have done a lot to prevent the spread of the virus and we are doing quite well so far. For example, the National Health Insurance Administration has incorporated and updated the citizen’s oversea travel record into the NHI Medi-Cloud system every day, which can be accessed by every doctor when he/she is seeing patients. Sounds cool, right?

I loved that. “Sounds cool, right?”

You can hear more about the Taiwan records system on a Reset episode with host Arielle Duhaime-Ross, produced by my reporting partner Byrd Pinkerton.

And even more will be coming soon. Sign up for the newsletter and submit your questions right here.

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