President Tsai shares Taiwan’s experience managing COVID-19 with Time

2020/04/22

President Tsai Ing-wen penned an article titled “How My Country Prevented a Major Outbreak of COVID-19,” published April 16 as part of U.S.-based Time magazine’s special series “Finding Hope: The Time 100 Community on Navigating our New Reality.”
 
The president attributed Taiwan’s ability to contain the spread of the disease to community-wide efforts, the necessity of which the country learned through the hard lessons of 2003’s severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak. This past experience spurred officials, health experts from the public and private sectors, and the general populace to rapidly respond to early warning signs in the Chinese city of Wuhan where the coronavirus was first reported last year, Tsai said.
 
 According to Tsai, the government immediately mobilized upon realizing the potential danger, implementing rigorous screening of passengers arriving from Wuhan in late December followed by the activation of the Central Epidemic Command Center, which put in place travel restrictions and quarantine measures for high-risk inbound passengers. Further measures, including tracking the contacts of confirmed cases, merging individuals’ travel histories with their medical records stored in the National Health Insurance database and providing transparent information to the public, were instrumental in preventing a widespread outbreak.
 
 Local businesses and apartment communities also deserve credit for doing their part by implementing temperature checks and sterilization procedures to supplement government efforts, Tsai said.
 
 To ensure an affordable and sustainable supply of surgical masks, the government teamed up with private enterprises to ramp up production while instituting a rationing system for all residents, according to the president. Dubbing this partnership “Team Taiwan,” Tsai said the efforts additionally enabled the country to donate supplies to allies and like-minded partners in need.
 
 Emphasizing how important unity is in times of global crisis, Tsai also urged the World Health Organization to rethink Taiwan’s unfair exclusion from the global body’s activities, mechanisms and meetings. Exceling in manufacturing, medicine and technology, the country is willing and able to share its expertise with the world, she said.
 
 Time has been publishing its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world since 2004, with this year’s edition dedicated to finding hope amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The Dalai Lama, Margaret Atwood, Mikhail Gorbachev and President Tsai were among those chosen to share their thoughts about our new reality.

Source: Taiwan Today (https://taiwantoday.tw/index.php)