Another noticeable difference is that Taiwan actions were real actions where the government did actually performed them whereis typical "actions" we see around like lockdown and masks are just government orders without the governments actually doing anything.
- The average age of death during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was 28 [1].
- 70% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths are age 70 and above [2].
These are very different pandemics, and it's not clear what comparisons between the two actually tell us.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoratio...
Looking at the world instead, COVID has killed just over a million people so far, and Spanish Flu is esimated to have killed anywhere between 17 and 100 million people, at a time when the world population was much less and travel was much harder. So yes, orders of magnitude.
what in our response to COVID was better and more effective than our response to Black Death and Spanish flu? I don't see any improvement despite 700 and 100 years of accumulated knowledge and technology development since then. There has so far been no indication that the only things we were able to muster - archaic lockdown and masks - can prevent it from reaching the 20-30% spread, basically the level of unmitigated spread.
I mean, for example, 700 years ago people couldn't know that that ship coming into the port of Venice brings the infection. A year ago we knew that this plane from Wuhan most probably does.