Coronavirus: how Taiwan was able to overcome the worldwide infection without any restrictive measures

The latest study from the Jama Medical Association decided to examine how Taiwan managed to cope so well with the new disease.

The authors of this study from various health institutions decided to collate the efficiency of two policies to combat the pandemic in its early months: case-based measures and population protection measures.

The first policy includes testing people who are sick, tracing their connections with people, and isolating all family members for two weeks. And the steps that are used to protect the population comprise the mandatory wearing of masks, the use of individual hygiene products and social distancing.

The impact of both policies was rated using the R number. This number is a way to appraise the prevalence of the illness and introduces the average number of people who will be at risk of infection. An indicator of this number in more than one means that the virus will spread further between people at a rapid rate, and if it is below one, then the amount of infected people will gradually disappear to zero.

In this research, accurate models were unified with real data, while, as in previous ones, only hypothetical scenarios about the efficiency of the methods were modeled. Researchers collected 158 cases between January 1 and June 1 of that year from the Centers for Illness Monitoring and all of the occasions were verified by tests. These data were compared exclusively with local facts of infection. After collecting information, the authors compared the results with an R of 2.5.