Limited testing, elderly patients and overflowing hospitals could be responsible for Taiwan’s higher than average COVID-19 case-to-fatality ratio, National Taiwan University Hospital doctor Lee Chien-chang (李建璋) said on Wednesday.
The number of COVID-19 deaths in Taiwan has risen to 411, including 399 since May 15, Central Epidemic Command Center data released yesterday showed.
The nation’s death rate from COVID-19 among confirmed cases is higher than the 2.14 percent global average.
Lee, a Harvard University-trained epidemiologist and doctor of emergency medicine, said that the rate in Taiwan is likely to climb to about 3 percent.
Mortality rates among confirmed cases are dependent on testing capacity. More COVID-19 testing uncovers more nonfatal cases, which lowers the result of a deaths-to-cases calculation, Lee said.
The US and the UK — countries with which Taiwan compares unfavorably in terms of deaths among cases — had earlier outbreaks and therefore more time to build robust testing capacity, he said.
The US and the UK each have tested about 5,000 people in 1 million, while Taiwan tests about 1,000 in 1 million, which leads to light and asymptomatic cases going underreported, he said.
As health authorities in Taiwan detect severe cases more reliably than light ones, the death rate is artificially higher, he said.
Missing light cases is a warning sign that suggests Taiwan has a serious gap in its capability to battle the pandemic, he said, adding that tests must be improved to keep up with the virus’ spread.
Age is another important factor in mortality, Lee said.
Of confirmed cases in Taiwan, 8.35 percent are people aged 70 or older, higher than the global average of 5.36 percent, he said.
However, people older than 70 account for 9.73 percent of confirmed cases in the US, which has a lower mortality rate among confirmed cases, suggesting that more issues are at play than the ratio of elderly people among cases, he said.
A comparative study of COVID-19 in the US showed that hospitals with fewer patients per doctor outperformed those with more in terms medical outcomes in cases of severe COVID-19, he said.
This indicates that hospitals need extra capacity so they are not overwhelmed, he said.
Constantly updated treatment advisories that incorporate lessons learned from recent experience written in plain and accessible language would significantly improve the quality of medical care during an outbreak, he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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