Failed Coronavirus Screening, Minister Chen a Fraudster
By Wang Ren-xian
China Times, May 15, 2021
Infectious respiratory diseases come and go without a trace, and it is impossible to stop them with aimless protection. One of the reasons is that masks and hand hygiene are not 100-percent effective, and the other is that people’s alertness may get fatigued and compliance get diminished over time. With such a strong awareness of personal hygiene among the people, the Novotel-China Airlines incident has evolved into such a serious outbreak of community infection. Obviously, the key to the problem is not protection.
The key to the success of Taiwan's first stage of epidemic prevention is not the people's habit of wearing masks but the screening of all inbound travelers. Everyone who enters Taiwan is requested to be diagnosed as a possible source of infection at the border, and must take a fever screening and a 14-day-quarantine at home. Therefore, the customs have blocked all patients from abroad, and ensured the safety of Taiwan. Just recently, because of the shortening of the inspection time for crew members and neglected to give them vaccination, it caused a disaster that could wipe out Taiwan. Some high-raking officials blamed the general public for not vigilant enough; they just shirk their responsibilities. If not so, how could those officials weeks ago praise the general public for wearing masks, and only days ago the community infections broke out?
In fact, the prevention and treatment of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is not difficult. Diagnose the patient at the very first possible timing, and quickly isolate the infected. The worst scenario is that the kind-hearted people wear masks 24 hours a day, while some infected people just don't wear masks and walk randomly everywhere. You will definitely be infected when you take off the mask and unaware of some infected people are around you. Those healthy people with masks on, and been infected are most unlucky innocent victims. When a community infection breaks out, now, in Taiwan, facts are: there is no checkpoint to check, no TOCC (travel history, occupation, contact history, and cluster) to consult, no health insurance card to insert to get information, and about 60 to 80 percent of infected people are asymptomatic. Can the source of infection be caught without screening but only by symptoms? It's no wonder that the epidemic has been brought into such a dire stage by those people in charge with incorrect mindset.
The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) believes that aimless general screening will waste public health resources, which is tantamount to firing guns into the air and wasting bullets. Is it correct? The coronavirus pandemic in the community in Taiwan was clear last year, so it really shouldn't start general screening at that time. However, now the community in Taiwan is not clear but full of viruses. If failed to sieving the virus in time, it is equivalent to seeing the enemy and not firing, but fleeing. A large-scale screening at this moment is not to cause a burden to public health, but on the contrary, to immediately trace the source of infection in time and put the pandemic under control. Therefore, a large-scale screening can reduce huge expenditure of public health resources on the check-ups of uninfected people, and reduce the risk of asymptomatic infections spreading outwards. Is it to increase or reduce the burden on public health?
The ranking officials of the CECC shouldn’t think that the local government health bureaus are responsible for carrying out the house quarantine, and push the responsibilities to the local Health Bureau in a “non-of-my-business” mentality, that “those to die are children of others, not mine.” While facing the people's health interests, the local government’s Health Bureaus did not blindly follow the wrong policy of the CECC. This time, the health bureaus of Yilan and the New Taipei fired the first shot of the zero-clearing screening, which made great contributions in preventing the spread of virus. The medical institutions nationwide under such a threat of spreading, also have promptly taken general screening. The result of large-scale screening shows that the virus positive rate reached up to10 percent of those been screened. This high positive rate has proved that what the CECC has previously claimed success, were all lies.
It is no longer persuasive, though the CECC still stubbornly reiterates its objection to the “aimless general screening”, because what every medical institution is doing, is aiming the coronavirus test and screening. It forced the CECC Commander finally to tell the truth: in facing the Wanhua cluster infections, "it is difficult to screen more than 40,000 people." It turned out that the CECC has only played politics during the one-year God-sent grace period. It hadn't properly prepared the screening capacity. Now that the enemy appeared in large numbers, it was then discovered that there were no bullets at all, and the people were still been cheated that the CECC is storing bullets in a sincere way. This is the same as cheating on vaccines. It is a big cheat, deceiving the lives of the people.
Screening is different from vaccines. Vaccines are out of stock, yet the CECC leaves the procurement of vaccines to the local governments. Ironically, vaccines can hardly be bought. However, the inspection capacity can be built by local government’s health bureau. In the aspects of personnel recruitment, procurement of approved reagents, and establishment of screening stations, etc., the local governments have full autonomy. Facing an incompetent CECC, local governments must improve their self-rescue capabilities, in accordance with autonomy laws, the sooner the better.
The author is the Chairman of the Epidemiology Association of the Republic of China.
From: https://www.chinatimes.com/opinion/20210515004027-262104