Transmission Dynamics and Effectiveness of Control Measures during COVID-19 Surge, Taiwan, April–August 2021
Supporting materials for Akhmetzhanov AR, Cheng H-Y, Linton NM, Ponce L, Jian S-W, Lin H-H. Transmission dynamics and effectiveness of control measures during COVID-19 surge, Taiwan, April–August 2021. Emerg Infect Dis. 2022 Oct https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2810.220456.
An unprecedented surge of COVID-19 cases in Taiwan in May 2021 led the government to implement strict nationwide control measures beginning May 15. During the surge, the government was able to bring the epidemic under control without a complete lockdown despite the cumulative case count reaching >14,400 and >780 deaths. We investigated the effectiveness of the public health and social measures instituted by the Taiwan government by quantifying the change in the effective reproduction number, which is a summary measure of the ability of the pathogen to spread through the population. The control measures that were instituted reduced the effective reproduction number from 2.0–3.3 to 0.6–0.7. This decrease was correlated with changes in mobility patterns in Taiwan, demonstrating that public compliance, active case finding, and contact tracing were effective measures in preventing further spread of the disease.
Thank you for your interest to our work!
The first notebook was written in R and Python using CmdStan for Bayesian simulations.
Words of caution: We note that the code is not supposed to work out of box, because the links used in the notebooks can be user-specific and some part of the dataset could not be openly shared (e.g. the linelist of COVID-19 that was used for reconstruction of the epicurve). Our main intent was to show the relevance of the methods used in our paper. We are grateful for your understanding in advance.