As the U.S. recorded its largest one-day spike in coronavirus cases just last week, Taiwan marks an accomplishment of reaching 200 days without any locally-transmitted cases of COVID-19. The last confirmed case was recorded on April 12th.
What We Know:
- Taiwan, with a population of 23 million, has seen only 550 confirmed cases of coronavirus, leaving 7 dead. The island is also one of the few countries whose economy has actually grown amid the pandemic; Taiwanese officials predicting a 1.56% increase in GDP in 2020.
- How is this possible in a global pandemic that led to more than 1 million deaths? Credit is due to the speed and resourcefulness of the Taiwanese government’s response to the virus, who locked-down the country two days before Wuhan did, on January 21, after the first confirmed case of Covid was reported on the island. Prior to that, Taiwanese officials began checking travelers arriving from Wuhan as soon as December 31st, the day that Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization of patients with unknown viral pneumonia in the city.
- Taiwan’s Vice President Chen Chien-jen, a trained epidemiologist, was prepared to combat the virus by utilizing the Central Epidemic Command Center, an emergency-response program for containing infectious diseases developed in 2003 after the country’s SARS outbreak and later used during the bird flu and H1N1 epidemics. Consequently, these pandemics also led to the public’s awareness and use of preventive measures such as regular hand-washing and mask-wearing.
- Taiwan speedily controlled the spread of the virus by regulating travel, contact tracing, mass mask and PPE enforcement, and an uncompromising quarantine mandate. Travelers were prohibited from entering the country if they were non-residents, and those who were allowed in were surveilled via cellphone signals to make sure they complied with the mandatory 2-week quarantine. The government also provided services to those in quarantine, including grocery deliveries, and even tended to their social needs with Line Bot, a robot that users can chat and text with. Chen defends the strict quarantine that 99.7% of the population has complied with, claiming the Taiwanese government “sacrificed 14 days of 340,000 people in exchange for normal lives for 23 million people”.
- According to VP Chen, contact tracing was pivotal in controlling the outbreak by identifying an average of 20-30 individuals contacted per each positive test result. One extreme case linked 150 contacts to one woman who contracted the virus; all contacts required to quarantine for two weeks, even if their test came back negative.
Despite their successful containment of the virus, Taiwan’s Covid cases linked to international travelers continue to increase, but they are closely monitored. Although Taiwan has not completely eradicated the virus from the island, the measures their government and citizens have taken to prevent further outbreak should be modeled after, especially as more countries begin to shut down for the second time due to large increases in positive tests.
