Taiwan, which has done an excellent job of controlling COVID-19 through public health measures (its previous daily case peak was 20 in March 2020), has seen its new daily cases skyrocket to over 300 on May 17, possibly breaking through the ability to successfully use contact tracing. Testing of the entire island may be necessary to attempt to isolate cases at this point. Taiwan’s extremely low vaccination rate (below 1%) makes it susceptible to outbreaks. Chinese press report that Taipei has refused vaccines from the mainland.
Taiwan has received 300,000 doses from AstraZeneca’s 1.02 million allocated from COVAX, and has contracts for 15 million doses from AstraZeneca and Moderna. Taiwan is rushing in 400,000 more doses of AstraZeneca to arrive today, primarily for frontline medical personnel and is trying to get Biden to release vaccines for its use.
