Taiwan, China has managed the COVID-19 crisis with an expertise that has prevented large scale infections in the country of 23 million, despite the country's location 85 miles from mainland China.
As of today March 20, 2020 there are only 100 confirmed cases in Taiwan, or one person in 230,000 and only 1 death with 22 recovered as of today. By comparison the Netherlands (one of only a dozen or so countries with adequate testing), with a population of 17,200,000 has 1,710 cases or 1 per 10,000 persons with 43 deaths and only 2 recovered.
(Among the countries with presumed adequate early testing and universal healthcare to varying degrees is China, Iran, South Korea, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark. Universal testing allows health authorities to better pinpoint where the hot spots are to allow better plans for mitigation.)
The following has been taken from a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association March 3, 2020.
"The country has 23 million citizens of which 850 000 reside in and 404 000 work in China. In 2019, 2.71 million visitors from the mainland traveled to Taiwan.
"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.
"On January 20, the Taiwan CDC announced that the government had under its control a stockpile of 44 million surgical masks, 1.9 million N95 masks, and 1100 negative-pressure isolation rooms.
"Taiwan citizens’ household registration system and the foreigners’ entry card allowed the government to track individuals at high risk because of recent travel history in affected areas.
"A mobile health declaration pass was then sent via SMS to phones using a local telecom operator, which allowed for faster immigration clearance for those with minimal risk. This system was created within a 72-hour period. On February 18, the government announced that all hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies in Taiwan would have access to patients’ travel histories."
From Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing by
C. Jason Wang, MD, PhD1,2; Chun Y. Ng, MBA, MPH2; Robert H. Brook, MD, ScD3,4
Article Information
Published online March 3, 2020. Journal of the American Medical Association JAMA
Full Article:https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689
Full Article:https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689
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