Taiwan currently ranks second in Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking, a measure of the best places in the Covid-19 era.
Photographer: An Rong Xu / Getty Images
Photographer: An Rong Xu / Getty Images
The first locally transmitted case of Covid-19 in more than eight months was reported in Taiwan, ending the world’s longest trajectory without a domestic infection and a reminder of the virus’s ability to control even the most successful attempts at it. to manage to outsmart.
A 30-year-old woman is said to have caught Covid-19 in Taiwan, Health Minister Chen Shih-chung said at a briefing in Taipei on Tuesday. While it has seen cases of travelers coming from outside, Taiwan’s last infection within the community was April 12.
The new local case came into repeated contact between December 7 and December 12 with a New Zealand pilot who had captured Covid-19 abroad before traveling to Taiwan, Chen said.
Health officials have identified 167 other people with whom the latest case came into contact before she was isolated, the Centers for Disease Control said in a statement. The patient is an employee of an affiliated company of Quanta Computer Inc., a company representative said in a telephone conversation with Bloomberg. Quanta has since tightened up its virus control measures.
Police tracked down the latest case after investigating all the people the pilot came into contact with before testing positive. Two other confirmed cases contracted the virus from the pilot while he was working with him on a flight from the US to Taiwan on Dec. 15.
Success story
The resurgence of a local outbreak threatens to derail one of the high-profile success stories in the global fight against the pandemic. Taiwan has managed to maintain its total number of cases 770, with only seven dead, due to a combination of restricting travel to the island early in the outbreak and implementing a strict quarantine and contact tracking strategy.
Taiwan is currently number 2 in Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking, a measure of the best places to be in the Covid-19 era.
However, the continued spread of the coronavirus around the world meant that Taiwanese authorities had to remain on their guard. Since the last domestic shipment case in April, more than 300 cases have been received by people returning from abroad.
Read more about Taiwan’s approach to reducing the virus here
In the absence of the virus, life could continue almost as usual in Taiwan, an island about 80 miles (130 km) off the southeast coast of China. Offices, schools and businesses have largely remained open as the government has avoided a lockdown, although the wearing of masks is still encouraged. Taiwan’s successful handling of the outbreak meant it dodged the economic damage seen elsewhere, making it one of the few places it still is predict growth this year.
The domestic travel industry has experienced something of a boom, with the 24 million people in Taiwan unable to travel abroad for vacations due to restrictions. Meanwhile, external demand for Taiwanese technology – it is home to Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., a major iPhone manufacturer and a slew of chip makers – remains strong as people buy laptops and tablets to work and study from home.
The economy is likely to grow by about 2.3% this year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg, in stark contrast to most other developed economies around the world that are expected to fall into recession.
Winter waves
Highly contagious and manifesting in some with little or no symptoms, the virus has re-emerged in a number of sites believed to have been largely eliminated. And many countries such as Japan and South Korea that were initially successful in fighting the virus are now facing their worst outbreaks with the onset of winter.
Thailand, the first country to register a Covid-19 case outside of China, and New Zealand both went more than 100 days without a locally transmitted infection before new cases came to light.
Covid inexplicably spreads and reduces containment Hope
Another outbreak took place in June in Beijing after 55 days with no local cases. George Gao, head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at the time that the transmission could have started a month earlier, with asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic patients still able to shed significant amounts of the virus. It’s also possible that it’s lurking in dark, moist conditions before amplifying in infected people, he said.
(Updates with more details on how the latter caught the virus in the third, fourth and fifth paragraphs)