What the U.S. Can Learn From Taiwan's Response to Coronavirus
The island employs an aggressive, well-planned answer that employs analytics to minimize the spread of disease.
'WITH CONFLICTING AND AT times contradictory messages coming out of the White House, the Dow Jones Industrial Average seesawing and even the most basic supplies such as hand-sanitizer in short supply, the United States – a country with a history of helping other nations conquer pandemics – got off to an agonizingly slow start in trying to contain coronavirus.
Wondering what an aggressive pandemic response looks like? Look to Taiwan, says Dr. C. Jason Wang, director of Stanford University's Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention.
Following the 2003 SARS epidemic, Taiwan dramatically built up its public health infrastructure to launch an immediate response to the next crisis.
Well-trained and experienced public health officials were quick to recognize the crisis and launched an emergency public health response to contain the emerging outbreak, Wang and colleagues from the United States and Taiwan reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"If you let the fire burn, you could lose control of the critical moment when we could deal with it and put it out faster," Wang says. "The impact is much greater."
An island just 81 miles off the coast of mainland China, Taiwan was a COVID-19 catastrophe waiting to happen. More than 850,000 of the island's 23 million citizens actually live in mainland China. Another 400,000 work there. Last year, nearly 3 million people from mainland China touched down in Taiwan, bringing billions of microbial hitchhikers with them, as travelers always do.
The virus picked the worst possible moment, just days before the Lunar New Year, to shift its base of operations from the animal kingdom into humans. It is a time when millions of Chinese and Taiwanese travel for the holidays. Many stream through Wuhan, the outbreak's apparent point of origin and one of just four major Chinese railway hubs.
Yet, against all odds, Taiwan has remained relatively coronavirus free. As of March 8, the World Health Organization had logged just 45 COVID-19 cases and one death since China notified WHO of the outbreak in late December. Not a single case has been reported in the last 24 hours. China's caseload now stands at about 81,000 with 3,100 deaths.
"It really does speak to the importance of planning," says Jeremy Youde, dean of liberal arts at the University of Minnesota Duluth and an internationally recognized expert on global health politics. "Not just the policy responses, but knowing what kinds of assets we have on the ground."
"We don't suddenly have 100,000 hospital beds lying around that could be used in the event of an outbreak."
How has Taiwan, a country on China's doorstep, managed to contain COVID-19 when so many countries have failed? One answer is leadership, and at the very top. Taiwan's vice president, Chen Chien-jen, is an epidemiologist who received his doctorate at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was formerly vice president of Taiwan's premier research institution.
Taiwan learned the hard way – in the SARS coronavirus epidemic in 2003 – what can happen when something goes wrong. For the first couple of months after the World Health Organization posted its first global SARS alert, Taiwan was spared the brunt of the epidemic. The island tallied just 29 probable cases and no deaths and the growth rate was relatively slow, typical of a minor outbreak.'>>>
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-03-10/lessons-learned-from-taiwans-response-to-coronavirus?