How is Taiwan’s fighting the coronavirus?
Taiwan’s disease prevention capabilities meet international standards
Photo: Xinhua
The Wuhan coronavirus has now reached at least 70 countries.
More than 90,000 people have been infected. The death toll has crossed 3000.
As the world fights the coronavirus, we take a look at how Taiwan is dealing with the threat. Taiwan has reported 41 confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Taiwan has an established comprehensive national disease prevention mechanism, which includes digitized disease monitoring systems, stringent border quarantine measures, extensive community-based countermeasures, advanced medical preparedness, an abundant the stock of preventive medical appliances and resources, concise guidelines and information for the reference of the general public, and annual disease prevention and control drills. Taiwan’s central and local governments coordinate with the private sector to jointly prevent the spread of epidemic diseases.
The fact that there have been far fewer locally transmitted cases of COVID-19 in Taiwan then in many other developed countries, testifies to Taiwan’s effective disease prevention efforts.
It helps that Taiwan has abundant experience in combating epidemic diseases: In the past 60 years and more, Taiwan has overcome outbreaks of cholera, malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis, and other communicable diseases, accumulating considerable experience and establishing an extensive disease prevention mechanism. Preventive measures at each working level were further fine-tuned after the SARS outbreak in 2003.
Taiwan making an across-the-board effort to block the influx of communicable diseases: Compared with disease outbreaks around the globe, outbreaks of communicable diseases in Taiwan have remained relatively low. Monitoring and control systems for outbound and inbound travelers are in place, as is a comprehensive nationwide mechanism designed to follow the development of an outbreak, thus preventing imported diseases from making inroads in Taiwan.
The COVID-19 outbreak started toward the end of December 2019; the Taiwanese government’s countermeasures—including expert meetings, and the implementation of policies designed to intercept and block the transmission of diseases from outside of Taiwan’s borders—had already been initiated by early January 2020.
Taiwan’s effective disease prevention achievements, therefore, now outperform many developed countries: Early assessments released by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University projected Thailand and Taiwan to have the highest risk of imported COVID-19. However, there have since been far fewer locally transmitted cases in Taiwan then in many other developed countries, testifying to Taiwan’s effective disease prevention efforts.
According to statistics released by the crowd-sourced global database Numbeo, Taiwan received the highest ranking for Health Care Index by Country 2020, with a score of 86.71. For comparison, Korea and Japan were ranked second and third, with scores of 81.97 and 81.14, respectively.
