TY - JOUR T1 - Epidemiological observations on breaking COVID-19 transmission: from the experience of Taiwan JF - Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health JO - J Epidemiol Community Health DO - 10.1136/jech-2020-216240 SP - jech-2020-216240 AU - Iona MacDonald AU - Jye-Lin Hsu Y1 - 2021/04/23 UR - http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2021/04/22/jech-2020-216240.abstract N2 - With almost no community-transmitted cases and without any complete lockdown throughout 2020, Taiwan is one of very few countries worldwide that has recorded minimal impact from the COVID-19 pandemic attack. This is despite being only 130 km from China and having frequent business communications with that country, where COVID-19 first emerged. At the end of December 2020, Taiwan had recorded just 873 cases and 7 deaths, in a country of around 24 million people. How to determine the effectiveness of public health policies is an important issue that must be resolved, especially in those countries that have experienced few cases of community-transmitted COVID-19. Our analysis of epidemiological data in Taiwan relating to influenza-like illness (ILI), enterovirus and diarrhoea from the past 3 years reveals dramatic reductions in the incidence of ILI and enterovirus in 2020, compared with 2018 and 2019. These reductions occurred within 2 weeks of the government issuing public health policies for COVID-19 and indicate that such policies can effectively reduce infectious diseases overall. In contrast, no such reduction in ILI activity was observed in 2020 after the first COVID-19 case was reported in the USA. We suggest that infectious diseases data can be used to inform effective public health policies needed to break the transmission chain of COVID-19 and that ongoing monitoring of infectious diseases data can provide confidence about nationwide health.Data are available in a public, open access repository. Data are available at the Taiwan CDC website: http://nidss.cdc.gov.tw/en/, the US Influenza Surveillance System via this website: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm, and the COVID-19 website: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/. ER -