Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan




Taiwan has much to offer from experience to stop COVID-19 in its tracks. While many countries are mired in the devastating wave brought on by the coronavirus, Taiwan with a sophisticated & world-class health care network has effectively employed data analytics to flatten the curve to a large extent by taking decisive measures early on and ahead of the rest of the world. In fact, it was predicted that Taiwan would have the second-highest importation risk of any country. Considering Taiwan’s proximity to China, such effective handling of COVID-19 in Taiwan, depicted in Fig. 1, demonstrates the efficacy of data analytics in managing public health crisis.



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.
Taiwan has 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. Upon their arrival in Taiwan, travelers with mobile phone numbers provided by telecom operators in Taiwan can use the Entry Quarantine System by scanning the QR Code while waiting at the check-in counter. Travelers can complete the health declaration form online while waiting for their flights or upon entry. The health declaration pass will be sent to travelers’ mobile phone via SMS (short message service) upon arrival in Taiwan. After that, travelers will get faster immigration clearance by showing the health declaration pass. Therefore, travelers can complete health declaration and get faster immigration clearance with 4 simple steps: scan the QR Code, fill out the form, get health declaration pass via SMS, and show the pass on your mobile phone.
Persons with low risk (no travel to level 3 alert areas) are sent a health declaration border pass via SMS messaging to their phones for faster immigration clearance; those with higher risk (recent travel to level 3 alert areas) are quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phone to ensure that they remained at home during the incubation period.
Moreover, Taiwan has 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.
All these steps taken & the subsequent satisfactory results achieved depicts data analytics can be extremely helpful in combating epidemic breakouts.

- Shaban Ghias Satti, Saima Sagheer

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