TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan’s success in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic was undermined by a lack of testing, low vaccination levels, and “hostess bars,” Bloomberg wrote Wednesday (May 19).

While closing the borders at the start of the pandemic seemed to have kept the worst of it out of the country, a decision on April 15 this year to shorten airline pilots' quarantine period to three days could be to blame for the current surge, with more than 200 new local cases being confirmed per day.

Infected pilots introduced the U.K. variant of the coronavirus to Taiwan before it spread to “hostess bars” in Taipei’s Wanhua District. The reluctance of both the staff and patrons to be associated with the bars made contact tracing more difficult, according to Bloomberg.

The news service quoted Gregory Poland, a virologist at the Mayo Clinic, as saying that for every 300 diagnosed cases, there are 3,000 unknown cases in the community. He recommends a “hard lockdown” and a quick vaccination campaign as the way out of the crisis.

Taiwan has been lagging behind other countries in both vaccination and general testing, which the government has rejected as a waste of medical resources which would produce too many false positives, the report said.

However, rapid testing is key to finding out how and where the virus is moving. The government recently announced the opening of test sites in several of the worst-hit areas.

Routine testing of high-risk groups, such as migrant workers and people active in nightlife, should be conducted, according to experts, and wastewater checks would be able to detect signs of the virus, which could lead to the detection of asymptomatic cases.

The Bloomberg report predicts that Taiwanese might have to wait a long time for vaccines, as only 725,000 AstraZeneca doses have arrived so far for a population of more than 23 million.