The Taiwanese Response to COVID-19 – Virtual Program

This is a virtual program, instructions on how to join this meeting will be sent the day before the event.

Taiwan’s response to COVID-19 is widely seen as a rare success story. Just 81 miles off the coast of China with upwards of 12,000 total arrivals to Taiwan from mainland China daily before the pandemic, the outcome could have been much different. Out of a population of 23 million, Taiwan has recorded 446 COVID-19 cases and just seven deaths. What steps did Taiwan take to protect its people? Can lessons learned from the Taiwan experience with COVID-19 be adapted as countries around the world struggle to re-open while avoiding a second wave? Join the World Affairs Council, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, and public health experts from Taiwan for a panel discussion on what worked in Taiwan and what are the takeaways for the ongoing efforts to protect populations from the growing spread of the coronavirus.

About the Speakers
C. Jason Wang, MD, PhD, is Director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes, and Prevention, and Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine, and of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University. He also co-chairs the mobile health and other new technologies group at the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences. He received his B.S. from MIT, Medical Doctorate from Harvard Medical School, and Ph.D. in policy analysis from RAND. After completing his pediatric residency training at UCSF, he worked in Greater China with McKinsey and Company. In 2000, he was recruited to serve as the project manager for Taiwan’s Healthcare Reform Taskforce. In 2012, he co-founded MedicusTek, a global medical solutions company focusing on medical internet of things and patient safety. Among his honors, he was selected as the student speaker for the Harvard Medical School commencement ceremony in 1996, a recipient of the 2011 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and an invited speaker for Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health 100th Year, Child Health Policy Symposium. His recent work on COVID-19 includes: 1) “Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing” published in JAMA, which has been viewed 988,777 times (as of June 19, 2020) and covered by 264 media outlets world-wide. 2) “Ethics and Governance of Digital disease Surveillance”, published in Science, and 3) “How Community and Unity Can Help Americans Survive”, published in Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Dr. Leonard S. Chuech, MD, is the Director of Medical Affairs at the Taiwan Adventist Hospital. He also serves as the CEO of International Medicine and Director of the Operation Room at Taiwan Adventist Hospital. He received primary education in the United States. He received his Medical Doctorate from National Taiwan University, College of Medicine. After completing urological residency training at National Taiwan University Hospital and Far Eastern Memorial Hospital, he worked as a urological specialist at the New Taipei City Hospital. Later he was recruited to the Taiwan Adventist Hospital as an attending urological specialist. He currently heads the Urological Treatment Center at the Taiwan Adventist Hospital, specializing in prostatic diseases, andrology, urological oncology, and female urology. He teaches medicine at the National Taiwan University Hospital at the Department of Urology, focusing on teaching the future generation of doctors. He is also the chair urologist at the Dianthus Maternal and Fetal Medicine, a leading maternal clinic in Taiwan. He is a member of the Taiwan Urological Association, the Taiwan Andrology Association, the American Urological Association and the European Association of Urology. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he had a major role in the response and restructuring of the Taiwan Adventist Hospital to combat the pandemic. He has been the main speaker in online conferences about dealing with the COVID pandemic from the perspective of a hospital with Australia, Guam, The Northern Mariana Islands, California, Toronto, New York, and other parts of The United States.

In Partnership with TECO