Taiwan’s Sudden Spike in COVID-19 Cases Could Have Been Due to Complacency

Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic last year, many countries lauded Singapore for its quick and effective response to the outbreak.

Soon after, cases skyrocketed after an explosion of infections in migrant workers’ dormitories was detected.

Towards the end of 2020, the authorities once again managed to contain the virus, with only a few community cases reported every day.

Singaporeans hence started to believe that they had seen the worst of the pandemic, but as we now know, we were dead wrong.

Tighter measures are now in place thanks to a surge in community cases, making us wonder if we’ll ever defeat this virus.

This up-and-down pattern isn’t endemic to Singapore, however, as many other countries have experienced the same thing.

COVID-19, it seems, will always punish complacency, and no country is immune to it.

Taiwan’s Initial Success at COVID-19 Containment

Taiwan, one of the countries that the whole world has also viewed as a shining example of how to contain the coronavirus, has been hit with a huge wave of COVID-19 cases recently.

Sounds like us, huh?

According to Bloomberg, Taiwan had few COVID-19 measures in place up until this week due to its highly effective containment strategy last year.

It had close to zero vaccinations, no local surveillance to fish out undetected infections, and had barely tested its residents—Taiwanese authorities have conducted only around 610,000 tests, whereas Singapore has done more than 11 million.

And thus, some suspected that complacency started to creep in—not just among the public, but also the authorities.

How It All Went Wrong

Things started to go wrong when the Taiwanese government decided to shorten quarantine for airline crew to just three days, since airlines were struggling to operate their cargo lines with their staff undergoing 14-day isolation periods.

Pilots who were infected abroad brought the virus back with them, and without a sufficient quarantine period, eventually spread it to others.

These infected pilots then introduced the more contagious UK variant through a network of “hostess bars” to the community.

And soon, cases were shooting up.

Before 1 May, Taiwan had just 1,132 cases. Now, it’s recorded around 1,024 local infections in just a few days.

No matter how bad at Mat you may be, you know things are really bad when your COVID-19 graph has a nearly 90-degree angle:

Of course, when you go from virtually zero to over a thousand cases in just a matter of days, it likely means that the virus has been spreading undetected in the community for quite some time.

Taiwan’s Response

To contain the outbreak before it gets out of hand, Taiwan has closed schools, limited social gatherings, and urged people to work from home. Some non-essential shops and entertainment venues have also been ordered to close.

The country is trying to avoid a hard lockdown, which will be activated if an average of at least 100 new daily cases is reported for 14 consecutive days with no links for half the cases.

As of Monday (17 May), only 0.9% of Taiwan’s 23.5 million residents have received their first vaccine dose.

Taiwan has ordered millions of vaccine doses from several companies, but global shortages have curtailed supplies.

It remains to be seen if Taiwan’s response to its second wave of the coronavirus will be as effective as its first.

Watch this video to the end on how masks could have prevented a lockdown:

Feature Image: Jack Hong / Shutterstock.com