Taiwan on track to end third COVID-19 community outbreak

  1. Torbjörn E. M. Nordling
  2. Yu-Heng Wu

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Abstract

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on December 31st, 2019, with the World Health Organization being notified of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan (China), Taiwan has successfully ended two COVID-19 community outbreaks. For 19 days, the third community outbreak has now been successfully suppressed, putting Taiwan on path to end it too around Aug. 16th based on our forecast using an exponential model. Since May 28th the 7-day average of reported confirmed infected, which peaked at 593, has been falling to 204 on June 16th and the 7-day average of reported suspected and excluded cases increased to above 25 000. Resulting in a decrease in the ratio of the 7-day average of local & unknown confirmed to suspected cases–the identified control variable–to less than one third of its peak value. The later is a hallmark of working contact tracing, which together with testing and isolation of infected are the keys to ending the community outbreak.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.20.21259178: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
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    We fitted this model to the ratio of the 7-day moving mean of local & unknown confirmed to the 7-day moving mean of suspected cases from the peak on 2021-05-28 to 2021-06-16, i.e. 19 time points, using the Curve Fitting Toolbox in Matlab R2015b by MathWorks using the ”NonlinearLeastSquares” estimator.
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    suggested: (MATLAB, RRID:SCR_001622)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

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    Israel only recently, on June 1st, lifted most restrictions, including limitations on the number of people at gatherings and proof of vaccination to enter e.g. gyms, theatres, hotels, and synagogues, and have kept border controls14. In a recent simulation study, Moghadas et al.15 predict that if all unvaccinated individuals in the United States revert to pre-pandemic life on July 4th, then it would result in the worst daily incidence of COVID-19 cases despite assuming close to 70% being vaccinated, but if only the vaccinate individuals revert, then it result in a minimal increase even if they revert two weeks after the first dose. Based on the recent estimate of the basic reproduction number without NPIs in Taiwan during the second outbreak at 6.73, 85% of the Taiwanese population would need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity. Considering the difficulties the Taiwanese government has faced in purchasing COVID-19 vaccines, it is unlikely that Taiwan could implement a population scale vaccination program and reach herd immunity any faster than other nations. A population wide vaccination campaign is likely to take a year before it could end this community outbreak, while the proven method of contact tracing, testing, and isolation is likely to end it around Aug. 16th. We forecast this end date based on fitting an exponential model to the daily ratios of the 7-day moving average of confirmed infected to suspected from the peak of 0.029 on May 28th to 0.0077 on June 16th. Th...

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    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.06.20.21259178v1 on medRxiv