Taiwan’s COVID slip: From Complete Freedom to Partial Lockdown

Taiwan has been a model of how to control the pandemic since its inception in early 2020, thanks to effective contact tracing, strict quarantine, and coordinated government action. However, these past few days have been unusual with the rapid increase in the number of domestic cases to a level that has never been reached since the pandemic started. We are adjusting from the sudden shift of one week vacationing in the Taiwan Penghu islands to now partially quarantining ourselves in Taipei this week.

In this article, we are taking a moment to bring you up to speed about the situation here in Taipei, what the short-term future may hold for this country and for ourselves. We will also update this article often to reflect the situation as it is still evolving quite rapidly.

Impressive numbers!

Taiwan has a been the envy of the world with its low covid numbers, 1136 total cases and 12 deaths as of 5/1/2021. Taiwan was so ahead of the game that they started enforcing preventative measures as early as January 2020, prior to the pandemic, which is quite impressive!

In contrast, as of 5/1/2021, Canada has reported 1.33M cases of COVID-19 (& 25,000 deaths) and the United States have reported 33M cases COVID-19 (and a staggering 568K deaths).

Strict Quarantine

Taiwan manages to keep the virus away from its border thanks to a strict 2 week quarantine that has been recently followed by an extra week of self-management where people take their temperature and practice social distancing while going out.

For more about our experience read: Nomad life during COVID-19: home quarantining in Taiwan

Past Outbreaks

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Taiwan managed to get two outbreaks under control that could have devastated the country if not closely monitored. Here is a recap for each of them:

• The New Zealand pilot affair (source) – On 12/22/2020, Taiwan broke its impressive 253 days streak of no local COVID19 transmissions. This was after a pilot from a New Zealand airline entered Taiwan (infected) from a trip to the USA (on 12/4/2020) to explore the island after completing his 3-day quarantine (more on that later in this post) without reporting his symptoms. The pilot infected a woman that tested positive on 12/22/2021 hence the end of the streak. To make things worse, when asked by the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) for details about his movement and location history the pilot was very reluctant to share anything, actually claiming that he doesn’t have a habit to record where he travels and when. It turns out that the woman that was affected might have been his mistress and that he did not want to disclose too many details about a potential affair during his trip to Taiwan. This did not prevent Taiwan’s effective contact tracing technology and teams to identify 167 people that came in contact with the woman and 87 that came in contact with the pilot and have all of them follow strict self-health monitoring and home quarantine procedure.
• Infected doctor taking a vacation (source) – On 1/12/2021, a doctor and nurse (who turned out to be his girlfriend) both tested positive to covid. The doctor was treating infected patients (imported cases of covid). The CECC rapidly identify 446 patients the doctor was in contact with. All of them turned negative to the test. There was also community transmission and a few places that both the doctor and the nurse travel to as they took a few days off from work. This lead to the complete evacuation of patients from the hospital the doctor worked at, the shutdown of businesses likes IKEA, Starbucks, a hardware store, and a shopping mall for full disinfection.

As you can see in these examples, Taiwan is impressive when it comes to figuring things out! The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) daily press releases are another great example of that level of detail. You can access them here.

Recent outbreak

The recent outbreak (that has now become an uncontained community spread of covid19) started by a pilot from China Airlines (a Taiwanese Airline company) that did not follow his post quarantine duties. After the first outbreak, Taiwan increased their quarantine rules for pilots (from 3 to 5-7 days – which is still low) but they just recently relaxed it again back to 3 days. On top of that, one hotel that had at least one floor completely allocated for the pilots to quarantine decided to run a nice promotion to attract more tourists. Tourists were not aware that they were sharing a quarantined hotel and while pilots and tourists did not mingle together, it turns out that some cross-contamination took place. By the time the pilot tested positive for COVID19, the hotel developed into a major cluster. Taiwan did their best to track everyone that might have been in contact with the initial spread but the tasks were more difficult than initially thought.

The number of domestic cases started to significantly increase over the past few days as you can see on the breakdown below (source)

• On 5/10 – 3 domestic cases, + 11 imported
• On 5/11 – 7 domestic cases, + 4 imported – Taiwan enter COVID-19 Alert level 2
• On 5/12 – 16 domestic cases, + 4 imported
• On 5/13 – 13 domestic cases, + 12 imported
• On 5/14 – 29 domestic cases, + 5 imported
• On 5/15 – 180 domestic cases, + 5 imported – Taiwan enter COVID-19 Alert level 3
• On 5/16 – 206 domestic cases, + 1 imported
• On 5/17 – 333 domestic cases, + 2 imported
• On 5/18 – 245 domestic cases + 5 imported (source)
• On 5/19 – 267 domestic cases + 8 imported (source)
• On 5/20 – 286 domestic cases + 9 imported (source)
• On 5/21 – 312 domestic cases + 3 imported (source)
• On 5/22 – 321 domestic cases + 2 imported (source)

Raising COVID 19 Alert level

With an ongoing number of domestic cases that could not be identified, the CECC decided to raise Taiwan COVID 19 Alert to Level 2 on 5/11. Outdoor gathering limits were lowered to 500 people and indoor gathering to 100 people. Businesses should also implement crowd management and activities that could not meet the requirements should be canceled or adapted accordingly.

As the number of clusters grew along with the number of unidentified cases, the CECC raised Taiwan COVID-19 Alert to Level 3 on Saturday 5/15. Outdoor gathering limits were lower to 10 people and indoor gathering to 5 people. People need to wear masks at all times while going outdoor and public spaces/entertainment venue will close (bars, theme park, movie theater…).

For more on each level, you can check the illustration below:
(each column describe one level, from level 1 to level 4)

What’s next for Taiwan?

Well, things have changed quite quickly here in Taiwan. This past weekend, streets were quiet and while people were still allowed to go to work or go to school, today all students have been asked to stay home and businesses are highly encouraged to have their staff work remotely.

What about us?

Well, first and foremost we are safe. We have been spending most of our weekend at home, just going out early to exercise and not taking any unnecessary risks. It turns out that we were planning to return to the USA to visit family and get vaccinated this summer. As I am writing this, we are currently evaluating our options and assessing whether or not we should return earlier to make sure we can still be in the USA by July. If Taiwan goes into COVID-19 Alert Level 4 we would be in a lockdown and since this never happened before, it is hard to assess how this will affect our ability to leave the country in the unfortunate event where this lockdown would last a very long period of time. Also, in all of its glory of handling the pandemic, a lot of people in Taiwan haven’t been very keen to get vaccinated and the country hasn’t received a lot of vaccines up until this latest outbreak. So being home during this time feels like a better option for us if we can return earlier and get vaccinated, spend time with family (and maybe friends!), and then return back after the summer.

Our bottom line

After being in Taiwan for more than a year and seeing their system in action, we have faith that the country will go through this latest (yet much more serious) outbreak but this will likely take much longer than the previous one and everyone’s day-to-day life will get more affected than it has been in the past.

We will keep reporting the daily updates (read below) as they come in, for those of you who are interested to follow this still very much developing story, make sure to come back to check this article!

Updates

We will provide updates below based on how the situation is evolving.

Update as of 5/18/2021

On 5/18 – 245 domestic case + 5 imported (source)

CECC Press Release as of 5/18/2021 about Taiwan COVID-19 daily confirmed cases

The numbers of new confirmed cases announced today have been decreasing since the initial surge, which is quite a relief. We were worried that Taipei City and New Taipei City might enter to Level 4 (lockdown) in the coming days but we feel this won’t be the case. Let’s hope that 5/17 was the peak in cases and that the following days would see numbers decreasing.

On the personal side, we found a flight leaving to California on Friday. We feel that we should get our change of returning home now that on our expected July 1st return date to visit family. We still need to find an appointment for a PCR test. As you might imagine everything is already booked as a lot of people are getting tested at the moment. We did manage however to find an opening for both of us on Thursday 5/20. We also try to go to an hospital in person but we were turned down for such test 🙁

Update as of 5/19/2021

On 5/19 – 267 domestic case + 8 imported (source)

CECC Press Release as of 5/19/2021 about Taiwan COVID-19 daily confirmed cases

The numbers of new confirmed cases announced today aren’t bad but we were expecting yesterday’s numbers to keep going down. This is rather flat than exponential growth which is good news. The question now seems to be about whether or not these numbers reflect reality and if Taiwan has enough testing capacity to test everyone. The answers seems to be mixed. So I guess we would need to wait for more data.

On the personal side, we managed to score a PCR test today! If our results turned out to be negative (we will get our result tomorrow) we should be heading back to the US as early as Friday 5/21!

Update as of 5/22/2021

On 5/22 – 321 domestic cases + 2 imported (source)

CECC Press Release as of 5/22/2021 about Taiwan COVID-19 daily confirmed cases

The numbers of cases are still around 300 per day without any major fluctuation.

On the personal side, we successfully flew back to California yesterday and got a shot of the Pfizer vaccine upon arrival. We are now quarantining for 7 days before being able to see our family!