As part of WP4 Taiwan’s civil society engagement, we conducted three sets of expert surveys to understand how people in legal professions, medical service providers and the local civic tech communities evaluate Taiwan’s COVID-19 responses. All three surveys consist of three parts: 1) demographic information, 2) general attitude toward COVID-19 responses and 3) field-specific questions.

For context, Taiwan was one of the last strong holds of zero-COVID policy and did not officially shift to “live with COVID” until May 2022. The Taiwanese border was fully closed to non-nationals as early as mid- March 2020 and only gradually reopened starting from March 2022. For most part of the first two years of the global pandemic, Taiwan only had a small-scale community outbreak in Spring 2021, with the daily count peaked at around 700 new cases in one day. Vaccination began to roll out in spring 2021 and by January 2022, more than 70% of the population had received the first dose. The community outbreak in the Spring of 2022 was briefly suppressed in March but bounced back again, with the daily count of new COVID cases surpassing 1K per day for the first time in mid-April.

To learn more about the findings and insights from these focus groups, read the full report below.