Taiwan is being vigilant as neighboring China grapples with a surge in respiratory illnesses, predominantly among children, that has inundated hospitals with young patients in the past week.
The Taiwan Centers for Disease Control said on Saturday that the island's ports and airports were all put on "high alert." Notices were placed at these locations urging travelers arriving from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau to seek medical attention if symptomatic and disclose their travel history to healthcare providers.
Recent reports from China's state-controlled media said hospitals in northern China, including in capital Beijing, are operating at full capacity, with one children's hospital reporting some 7,000 new patients daily.
Taipei, which has little trust in Beijing's official data to begin with, is particularly attentive to health crises across the Taiwan Strait. It was at the forefront of early alerts to the World Health Organization (WHO) about COVID-19 when it first emerged in Wuhan, in large part thanks to protocols established after China's SARS outbreak in 2003.
Swift measures, such as suspending flights from China and efficient use of technology for contact tracing, enabled Taiwan to contain its outbreak for over a year.
Citing Chinese government data, the Taiwan CDC said it was monitoring a five-week spike in respiratory infections, in which outpatient and emergency cases surged to 2.5 times the typical number observed over the past three years, even during the peak of China's COVID outbreak.
"Taiwan is vigilantly monitoring the situation," Fang Chi-Tai, a professor at the Institute of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at National Taiwan University, told Newsweek on Monday.
Taiwan has heightened disease surveillance and recommends preventive measures such as mask-wearing as well as maintaining personal hygiene upon arrival in China, Fang said.
Taiwan's public health authority said individuals planning trips to China should consider receiving vaccines for COVID and influenza at the earliest opportunity.
As of the publication time, the U.S. CDC had yet to issue any new travel advisories for China.
Information shared by Chinese health authorities indicated the spike in infections results from the simultaneous circulation of various seasonal illnesses, including mycoplasma pneumonia, influenza, adenovirus, respiratory syncytial virus and COVID, according to the WHO.
Mycoplasma pneumonia, commonly known as "walking pneumonia," typically presents as a mild community-acquired illness. Its symptoms include fever, cough, bronchitis, sore throat, headache and fatigue.
Children face a higher risk of developing pneumonia when infected.
Taiwan CDC's Deputy Director-General Lo Yi-chun said that mycoplasma epidemics tend to peak after two to three months, the island's semi-official Central News Agency reported Sunday. China's information to the WHO suggests the pneumonia outbreak began in May, Lo said.
The Chinese government is yet to release relevant infection data to the public, while individual hospitals also haven't disclosed the volume of new cases related to the latest outbreak.
Hua Shandong, a pediatrician at Seventh Medical Center of the Chinese PLA General Hospital in Beijing, told the state-owned China Daily newspaper in late October that severe cases were rising in number, "but there are very few critical cases, and there are no related deaths so far."
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Micah McCartney is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers U.S.-China relations, East Asian and Southeast Asian ... Read more
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