Taiwan has been one of the countries that successful contained the spread of COVID 19 since its early outbreak stages. Taiwan's national health care system and Center Epidemic Response Team's responses strategies are proven effective internationally.
C. Jason Wang reported in JAMA Network that Taiwan was expected to have the second highest number of COVID-19 cases since Taiwan’s coast is only 81 miles away from mainland China, where the pandemic originated, and people frequently fly back and forth.
However, Taiwan took lessons learned from SARS in 2003 and established a public health response mechanism for containing and performing rapid actions for the next crisis. The Taiwan Center for Disease Control has been tracking the development of the virus and cooperating with the Center for Disease Control in teh United States since December. The Central Epidemic Response Team was activated in January 22, 2020. Two days later there were just two confirmed cases in 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,” Wang wrote.
Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Response Team used border control, case identification, and containment then, reincorporate new technology such as a QR code system to control and identify new cases.
On a scale of 0 to 100, the independent statistical archive NUMBEO, rates Taiwan’s health care system at 86.71, highest among all countries, following by South Korea with 81.97. While the United States scored a 69.27 with a ranking of 30.
