With only 500 confirmed cases and 7 deaths from COVID-19 as of mid-September, Taiwan is widely regarded as a success story in COVID-19 containment. Rapid mobilisation of clinical lab resources played an important role in the containment efforts, according to Dr Fang-Yeh Chu, Director in the Department of Clinical Pathology and QMC at Far Eastern Memorial Hospital (FEMH), a large private hospital in Taiwan.

In this recent webinar, Dr Chu describes how Taiwan’s health authorities responded aggressively and proactively to the pandemic. In January, while healthcare systems in many countries dithered, Taiwanese hospitals quickly implemented special infection control procedures. Soon thereafter, public health officials set up contact tracing applications, held regular press meetings to educate the public about key measures, and imposed strict fines for those who defied isolation orders.

Amid this rapid and comprehensive response, clinical labs in Taiwan moved quickly to scale up their testing capabilities. Dr Chu discusses the experience of FEMH in joining the coordinate national testing efforts, sharing details on how he pulled together a special team to manage COVID-19 testing while managing the risks of these efforts patients and employees at the hospital.

Dr Chu’s presentation also explores operational considerations around COVID-19 testing, such as the factors that can lead to false positives or negatives in the pre-analytic, analytic and post-analytic phases. It then looks at use cases for various testing modalities, including the potential role of antibody tests for seroprevalence studies and rapid antigen tests for case identification.