There is no hysteria aside from the media…and even then have little bones to chew on.
Sure, there are calls for closing down the country, but mostly from the same camp that refers to this as Hong Kong virus.
Look, they could not know the scope of the infection. They stopped people going in the hospital after the first case. No way to do it before.
The extended quarantine is based on new information. The CECC has the data of patients and caretakers and family members, but of course, the delivery people, the visitors, and other extras could be a bit harder to find.
As to the camps and such, well, we did that last year, nothing new. Remember?
New Taipei has cancelled a bunch of activities as from those 5000 new recalls, there are 500 residing in New Taipei.
Which is why you quarantine and test aggressively before you get infected people and their infected family members going to public markets a day after they were tested for the virus, or serving food at a fast food joint days after their infected household members developed symptoms.
See: Vietnam. South Korea. New Zealand. Australia. Singapore.
Testing as we have seen is not that helpful and relying too much on it ain’t helping.
Now testing who? Every one who enters any and all hospitals all the time?
The people went to public markets even before they knew the cases were sick.
Yes, they are tightening the measures. But it is a slimy enemy. So far what has been done has been done well. Now that circumstances have changed, so have the measures.
Calma pueblo, un día a la vez. Keep calm, take it one day at a time.
Do what you can to protect yourself. Wash hands, wear mask, sleep well, take vitamins, exercise. Not much you can do here or abroad by yourself.
This will suck for working parents, but it is necessary.
F@&k that guy who traveled to US during pandemic.
5000 people now have to endure 14 days quarantine because of him.
You should read about how they use have used testing effectively in other countries because you’re apparently not understanding. It’s about the combination of testing and isolation.
You don’t test somebody with a direct exposure and when they test negative, let them go out the next day. In the hospital cluster, Taiwan didn’t test aggressively enough and they also relied too heavily on the negative tests. These are not contradictory conditions.
You test direct contacts and their direct contacts, and all of the people who were at a location where an outbreak has occurred. This makes it possible to identify some subset of positive cases earlier, especially the asymptomatic carriers who would never be tested if you just tested based on the presence of symptoms.
Once you have tested, you still isolate/quarantine for at least 14 days because the negative tests aren’t dispositive.
If the CDC had followed this very effective model used in Vietnam, the positive cases we know were out in the community would never have been out in the community, and you wouldn’t have another 5,000 high-risk people being retroactively ordered to quarantine after many of them had already been out in the community.
Huh? What “old testing song”? You don’t test when there’s no virus in the community and no potential community exposures. You test when there is.
What’s so hard to figure out? This isn’t rocket science. Like I said, look at Vietnam. When they get a cluster, they test and quarantine aggressively. They don’t leave it to chance. And when the threat passes, they go back to normal.
On Jan. 23, the pair visited Danan Market again from 10:40 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. ← How that could be possible? One full day inside the market, that market must be really fun.
Were you around when Tony Chan, the contrarian NTU professor, was holding a press conference seemingly every other day telling anyone who would listen that the CDC was doing it wrong, that more testing was needed… Then he was busted for not following protocol when he collaborated with the Changhua County guy to yank folks out of quarantine to, you know, test them . . . to find out that actually a miniscule number of folks in this little experiment actually had traces of the virus?
Put otherwise: we have heard this “song” many many times.
The point being: the CDC has to date proven itself to be an astonishingly adept and responsive organization. Yes they are empowered with laws and sticks (including the ability to levy big fines) that very few other democracies have at their disposal. And yes there have been f-ups (notably the “discharged seamen” debacle). But until the current Taoyuan cluster jumps out of control, I think these guys deserve the benefit of the doubt. I am not being pollyanna-ish here, I am just observing what has happened so far and stating why the jumpy “They should have done this! They need to do that!” tone of this thread lately is premature—especially when NO ONE setting policy is turning to forumosa for tips on how to do their job (THANK GOD).
And another that believes that Quarantine is optional. And they wanted special treatment (reduced or no Q if they had received the Chinese Jab) for those returning for CNY.
Well, that’s not what I’m talking about here. There has never been any evidence to suggest that Taiwan had a bunch of infected people running around. If it did, people would have gotten sick and the testing being done would have showed positivity rates higher than close to 0.
So I’m not talking about testing everybody on the island. I’m talking about now that we have a cluster outbreak at a hospital, Taiwan’s CDC should be testing and quarantining aggressively along the lines of what other countries have done after cluster outbreaks emerged. These aren’t random strategies from message boards. Just as Taiwan has tried to share knowledge from its success in battling the virus, Taiwan should be looking to learn what other countries have done successfully, including in situations Taiwan hasn’t faced.
I provided a link about Vietnam’s amazingly successful strategy above.
The CDC’s order to quarantine 5,000 people tied to the hospital is more along the lines of what Vietnam has done but like I said, the problem is that direct contacts and their direct contacts were allowed to go out into the community, even after they were identified as direct contacts.
It’s great people are being quarantined now, but many of them have been out and about over the past two weeks and the reality, like it or not, is that we don’t know how many potential exposures there have been. Hopefully, no spread came from these exposures and we can breathe a sigh of relief in a few weeks, but some of the posts here are starting to sound like a gambler on a winning streak who think he’s winning because he has a special technique when he rolls the dice, not because he’s lucky.
I don’t know why it’s so controversial to point out that having somebody who was exposed be allowed to go out to a public market the day after they got a test is a f-up. Or why it’s so controversial to point to real-world examples of countries that have succeeded in dealing with the situation Taiwan is facing for the first time in the pandemic.
It’s one thing to respect Taiwan’s success in keeping the virus out of the community to date. It’s another thing to start drinking Kool-Aid and ignore when things are starting to slip.
As you rightly observe, the CDC has adjusted its strategy.
I don’t think folks here are necessarily disagreeing with you. The difference may be that we recognize that we do not fully see the vast range of contact tracing, isolation, etc that is actually happening—and which is more in line with what you are insistently calling for. We get it, but we also do not think the CDC is reading this forum for advice.
