Proactive and blended approach for COVID-19 control in Taiwan

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become the greatest threat to human society in a century. To better devise control strategies, policymakers should adjust policies based on scientific evidence in hand. Several countries have limited the epidemics of COVID-19 by prioritizing containment strategies to mitigate the impacts on public health and healthcare systems. However, asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic transmission of COVID-19 complicated traditional symptom-based approaches for disease control. In addition, drastic population-based interventions usually have significant societal and economic impacts. Therefore, in Taiwan, the containment strategies consisted of the more extended case-based interventions (e.g., case detection with enhanced surveillance and contact tracing with active monitoring and quarantine of close contacts) and more targeted population-based interventions (e.g., face mask use in recommended settings and risk-oriented border control with corresponding quarantine requirement). The success of the blended approach emphasizes not only the importance of evidence-supported policymaking but also the coordinated efforts between the government and the people. (c) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).