Taipei [Taiwan]: At a time when the world is reeling under the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan in an astounding feat has gone 200 days without a locally transmitted case.
According to the US media report, among the 23 million people, the country has had 550 confirmed cases and seven fatalities even as the virus continues to spread across the world.
Cindy Wang and Samson Ellis of the Bloomberg reported that Taiwan had last recorded local case on April 12. "Taiwan is the only major country that has so far been able to keep community transmission of Covid eliminated," Peter Collignon, professor at the Australian National University Medical School.
Professor Collignon said that Taiwan "probably had the best result around the world." According to the report, Taiwan will be among the few economies to grow in 2020. Experts have credited Taiwan's success in combating COVID-19 to the various reasons including an early ban to all non-residents soon after the pandemic broke out in January.
"Taiwan's continual success is due to strict enforcement of border control," said Jason Wang, director of Stanford University's Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention.
Wang further talked about other measures that helped the country such as symptom-based surveillance and digital fence tracking to ensure their compliance with a 14-day quarantine.
Furthermore, analysts believe that the lessons of past epidemics helped Taiwan in tackling Covid-19. According to Johns Hopkins University, there have been 44,871,314 cases and 1,178,751 deaths in the world so far.
