The results in Taiwan have clearly been better than in the US, despite being so close geographically to China and having so many people who frequently travel between the two places. They have had so far about 108 confirmed cases and 2 deaths, one of which was an over 80 person with serious existing conditions that compromised his immune system. I think that the other one was over 80 too, but am not 100% certain.
No wonder you love Trump so much--you have about the same level of curiosity as he does. Try googling and reading more than a couple of paragraphs for a change. Taiwan was proactive from early January, engaged in a high level of honest communication with its citizens, made sure that they had enough masks, gowns and other equipment that they knew would be needed, not only established travel guidelines but made sure that everyone who returned to Taiwan was checked and double checked and quarantined if they were deemed high risk, and more. The article below (linked in the article I excerpted before) explains it in far more detail:
Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan
Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing
C. Jason Wang, MD, PhD1,2; Chun Y. Ng, MBA, MPH2; Robert H. Brook, MD, ScD3,4
Author Affiliations Article Information
JAMA. Published online March 3, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.3151
March 3, 2020
Taiwan is 81 miles off the coast of mainland China and was expected to have the second highest number of cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) due to its proximity to and number of flights between China. 1 The country has 23 million citizens of which 850?000 reside in and 404?000 work in China. 2, 3 In 2019, 2.71 million visitors from the mainland traveled to Taiwan. 4 As such, Taiwan has been on constant alert and ready to act on epidemics arising from China ever since the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003. Given the continual spread of COVID-19 around the world, understanding the action items that were implemented quickly in Taiwan and assessing the effectiveness of these actions in preventing a large-scale epidemic may be instructive for other countries.
COVID-19 occurred just before the Lunar New Year during which time millions of Chinese and Taiwanese were expected to travel for the holidays. Taiwan quickly mobilized and instituted specific approaches for case identification, containment, and resource allocation to protect the public health. Taiwan leveraged its national health insurance database and integrated it with its immigration and customs database to begin the creation of big data for analytics; it generated real-time alerts during a clinical visit based on travel history and clinical symptoms to aid case identification. It also used new technology, including QR code scanning and online reporting of travel history and health symptoms to classify travelers’ infectious risks based on flight origin and travel history in the past 14 days. Persons with low risk (no travel to level 3 alert areas) were sent a health declaration border pass via SMS (short message service) messaging to their phones for faster immigration clearance; those with higher risk (recent travel to level 3 alert areas) were quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phone to ensure that they remained at home during the incubation period.
Moreover, Taiwan enhanced COVID-19 case finding by proactively seeking out patients with severe respiratory symptoms (based on information from the National Health Insurance [NHI] database) who had tested negative for influenza and retested them for COVID-19; 1 was found of 113 cases. The toll-free number 1922 served as a hotline for citizens to report suspicious symptoms or cases in themselves or others; as the disease progressed, this hotline has reached full capacity, so each major city was asked to create its own hotline as an alternative. It is not known how often this hotline has been used. The government addressed the issue of disease stigma and compassion for those affected by providing food, frequent health checks, and encouragement for those under quarantine. This rapid response included hundreds of action items (eTable in the Supplement).
Recognizing the Crisis
In 2004, the year after the SARS outbreak, the Taiwan government established the National Health Command Center (NHCC). The NHCC is part of a disaster management center that focuses on large-outbreak response and acts as the operational command point for direct communications among central, regional, and local authorities. The NHCC unified a central command system that includes the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), the Biological Pathogen Disaster Command Center, the Counter-Bioterrorism Command Center, and the Central Medical Emergency Operations Center. 5
On December 31, 2019, when the World Health Organization was notified of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, Taiwanese officials began to board planes and assess passengers on direct flights from Wuhan for fever and pneumonia symptoms before passengers could deplane. As early as January 5, 2020, notification was expanded to include any individual who had traveled to Wuhan in the past 14 days and had a fever or symptoms of upper respiratory tract infection at the point of entry; suspected cases were screened for 26 viruses including SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Passengers displaying symptoms of fever and coughing were quarantined at home and assessed whether medical attention at a hospital was necessary. On January 20, while sporadic cases were reported from China, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (CDC) officially activated the CECC for severe special infectious pneumonia under NHCC, with the minister of health and welfare as the designated commander. The CECC coordinated efforts by various ministries, including the ministries of transportation, economics, labor, and education and the Environmental Protection Administration, among others, in a comprehensive effort to counteract the emerging public health crisis.
Managing the Crisis
For the past 5 weeks (January 20-February 24), the CECC has rapidly produced and implemented a list of at least 124 action items (eTable in the Supplement) including border control from the air and sea, case identification (using new data and technology), quarantine of suspicious cases, proactive case finding, resource allocation (assessing and managing capacity), reassurance and education of the public while fighting misinformation, negotiation with other countries and regions, formulation of policies toward schools and childcare, and relief to businesses.
continues at jamanetwork.com
They did a lot of things besides restricting travel. And the way they enforced their travel restrictions was far more stringent and comprehensive than what Trump did because Trump was more interested in downplaying the virus and calling it a "hoax" that Democrats and his enemies were perpetrating on the country in order to make him look bad. |
