How Taiwan has responded to COVID-19 and how COVID-19 has affected Taiwan, 2020–2022

The association between interest of nutritional supplements and COVID-19 pandemic - evidence from Google Trends

“…In addition, there were sudden peaks of RSVs for vitamin C and D during the years of 2021–2022. The sudden peaks of RSVs for vitamin C and D could be explained by the local community outbreak of COVID-19 in May 2021 in Taiwan [ 33 ]. All the above observations showed that interest in nutritional supplementation for non-Taiwanese individuals had risen substantially during the peaks of the global COVID-19 pandemic.…”

On the Asymmetric Relationship Between Physician Mental Health Disorders on Quality of Healthcare Under the COVID-19 Pandemic in Taiwan: Quantile on Quantile Regression Analyses

“…The prevalence of mental health disorders is calculated as the proportion of total outpatient visits attributed to these symptoms of mental health disorders. Since the individual's behavior in seeking care may have changed due to fear of COVID-19 infection during the pandemic outbreak, 51 the social distance index (SDI), originated by Vokó and Pitter's research, 56 was used as a control variable to measure the magnitude of individual behavior change by comparing the time spent at various categories of places (such as retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential areas) to a baseline period before the pandemic. Given the promotion by Taiwan's government of the voluntary stay-at-home policy during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the positive or negative deviation from the baseline period of time spent at workplace areas and the other five places can reflect an individual's social distancing behavior.…”

“…Specifically, the specification of the QQRM is displayed as follows: where y t and x t represent healthcare quality and physician mental health disorders at time t, respectively. Since the linkage of y t and x t may be confounded by the individual's behavior change in seeking care during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, 51 the social distance index (z t ) was included in (Equation 1) to control for this confounding effect. In addition, Sim and Zhou introduced an autoregressive term (y t-1 ) in (Equation 1) to account for potential auto-correlation in the error term.…”

“…Second, Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) system provides comprehensive healthcare coverage to all residents, ensuring universal access to healthcare services, and it has responded effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic, successfully mitigating its adverse impacts and ensuring the continued provision of healthcare services. 51 Nevertheless, previous studies have raised concerns regarding the quality of healthcare services within Taiwan's NHI system, specifically highlighting issues related to shortages in nurse staffing and intense competition among clinics and hospitals. 52,53 Consequently, investigation into the link between physician mental health disorders and healthcare quality is important, providing insights into the potential challenges faced by the healthcare system from the perspective of physician labor input and its impact on healthcare quality.…”

Temporal changes in biomarkers of neutrophil extracellular traps and NET‐promoting autoantibodies following adenovirus‐vectored, mRNA, and recombinant protein COVID‐19 vaccination

“…This study does have some limitations. First, we chose to focus on individuals who received the protein vaccine Medigen (MVC-COV1901), which was relatively less commonly used, particularly compared to the Novavax (NVX-CoV2373) vaccine, to minimize potential time gaps arising from use of different vaccine types.Novavax's emergent authorization was delayed in Taiwan by 10 to 15 months relative to the vaccines developed by Medigen, Moderna, and the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca [36][37][38]. Second, our study had a relatively small sample size.…”