Learn the taiwan lesson in the fight against covid
A recent article (DJ Summers, DH-Y. Cheng, PH-H. Lin et al., Potential lessons from the Taiwan and New Zealand health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, The Lancet Regional Health - Western Pacific) contains interesting ideas for designing an effective response against the current COVID pandemic, as well as for rethinking national plans in the event of new future pandemics, which could be even more severe than the one we are experiencing.
First, the management of the pandemic should be delegated to a single government health agency, which operates within a pre-established legislative framework, and which is able to establish stringent measures, calibrated and proportionate according to the contingent situation. Exactly the opposite of what is happening today in Italy, where decisions on measures to combat the pandemic are shared between a plurality of actors, with the political dimension that often prevails over the technical one.
It could be referred to the division of competences between the State level and the level of the Regions, which have presidents who are the expression of different parties, with very heterogeneous degrees of competence, efficiency, and methods of approach to the government of public affairs. Or consider the positions of the Ministry of Health, which must be brought to the Council of Ministers, thus being subjected to the collegial debate by virtue of which the technical input proposal becomes a political output decision, being the result of synthesis between the different visions and political souls of majority parties. Not to mention the parliamentary debates and the extemporaneousness of the decisions, taken from time to time without there being a general strategic plan.
It is quite evident that the sanitary measures to combat the pandemic evoke more or less marked restrictions on individual freedoms, and this requires particular caution with regards to the constitutional level and the rule of law.
But a pandemic emergency legislation, approved by Parliament in "peacetime" (i.e., without the pressure, even emotional, of an ongoing pandemic) with all the constitutional guarantees, would certainly solve the problem.
It should be remembered, in fact, that it is very true that the fundamental rights of individuals are at stake, such as the right to free movement within the territory of the State, or to enter and leave it, or to free economic initiative, or to one's own privacy, and so on. But it is equally true that there are fundamental duties, such as not to put at risk the health and even the life of others, invoking fundamental rights as an excuse to move without rules and infect others.
This agency, therefore, should also have the role of coordinating the other authorities, and should act along the guidelines of a plan that provides for diversified and articulated measures in response to pathogens with different characteristics and at different stages of the situation. Taiwan, from this point of view, and unlike other advanced economies, had prepared in time.
It is also necessary to provide for a real-time health surveillance system, including through systematic monitoring of wastewater, and constant surveillance at the borders, including a robust quarantine system.
The digital monitoring system for contacts (contact tracing) and compliance with the rules of isolation (for infected subjects) and quarantine (for suspected subjects), albeit with the utmost respect for privacy, must become mandatory and constitute a condition for access to services (transport, public offices, schools and universities, shops, restaurants, workplaces, premises open to the public, and so on): it cannot be allowed a full discretion of the citizen in installing or not an app considering the protection of collective health.
The app can also favour nominative distribution systems for personal protective equipment and, in the future, vaccines and drugs (such as antivirals), and act as a recognition system (between those who should be in quarantine and those who can circulate, among those who is vaccinated and who is not, and so on).
It is necessary to put in place an adequate and proportionate system of sanctions: whoever deliberately violates the quarantine or, worse, circulates knowing that he is infected must be punished in a sufficiently serious way to constitute a valid deterrent against improper behaviour.
Finally, in times of "peace", pandemic emergency plans must be specially tested and recalled with specific exercises, as is done for fire alarms in public buildings or for military exercises, so that the country's key resources are always ready to face pandemics which, cyclically, since the beginning of the world, tested humans’ resilience.