Thread by @yaneerbaryam

Taiwan, which has had very few community cases throughout the past year, has recently loosened its border restrictions and is now seeing its largest community spread since the beginning of the pandemic.

1/

Previously, nearly all of Taiwan's cases were caught at the border via mandatory quarantines. This allowed the rest of the country to remain fully open for most of the year.

2/

The current outbreak, however, has caused community transmission, with cases spreading to those with no travel history. Multiple clusters have been found and 132 of today's 180 cases were without a known source.

3/

theguardian.com/world/2021/may…

Despite transmission across the country, only Taipei increased restrictions to "level 3". This requires mask-wearing in public, limited gathering sizes, and closure of all businesses except essential services, law enforcement, government and health services.

4/

Residents in neighborhoods with community transmission are being required to stay within defined perimeters and comply with testing, while schools and gatherings are suspended in those neighborhoods.

5/

The strategy of "snap" lockdowns refined and shown to be effective by New Zealand and Australia would be the best strategy for Taiwan. A short strong lockdown would enable contact tracing to get ahead of the transmission chains./

Mass testing would help shorten the lockdown.

6/

Taiwan's health minister announced that alert level 4 (one tier higher than what is presently in place) would not be triggered unless there were 100 or more daily cases for seven consecutive days.

Going first to higher restrictions would reduce impact on health and economy.

7/

Regardless, restrictions or incentives ought to be put in place such that the country returns to 0 cases in a short time. It is a mistake to tolerate community transmission for extended periods of time.

8/

Meanwhile, the B1.617.2 variant, first found in India, has begun spreading widely in the UK, rising from 520 cases last week to 1313 cases this week.



9/

(Presumably these are under-counts, as only a small portion of cases are typically sequenced to determine which variant is responsible.)

10/

This variant has also caused a cluster of vaccine-evading infections in Singapore airport staff.

This is particularly surprising as Singapore has extensive experience in careful prevention during the last year. Revisiting precautions seems essential

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1392366780828553221

11/

[Thanks to @geekblake for preparing today's update]

The relaxation of border control that was done applied only to pilots. That was enough.

taipeitimes.com/News/front/arc…