Kenneth Chuang Yin-ching () is a Taiwanese epidemiologist. As of January 2020, he leads the

Taiwan Centers for Disease Control The Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (CDC; ) is the agency of the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Republic of China (Taiwan) that combats the threat of communicable diseases. Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) The Central Epidemic ...

(TCDC) Communicable Disease Control Medical Network. __TOC__

Career

Chuang earned a degree in medicine at

Kaohsiung Medical University The Kaohsiung Medical University (KMU; ) is a private medical school located in Sanmin District, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. History The university was originally established as Kaohsiung Medical College in 1954 by the former mayor of Kaohsiung City, Ch ...

, and completed his residency at

Taipei Veterans General Hospital Taipei Veterans General Hospital () is a national first-class medical center and a teaching hospital that provides tertiary patient care, undergraduate medical education programs and residency programs in Taiwan. It was founded in 1958 and admin ...

. He specialized in epidemiology and infectious diseases while teaching at

National Cheng Kung University National Cheng Kung University (NCKU; ) is a public research university located in Tainan, Taiwan. The university is best known for engineering, computer science, medicine, and planning and design. As a top university in Taiwan, NCKU has played ...

. Chuang was the superintendent of , Liouying branch.

COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan

Chuang rose to prominence during the

COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan The COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan is part of the COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 () caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (). As of 18 December 2022, 28,928,047 tests had been conducted in Taiw ...

. Chuang and two colleagues issued on 16 January a level-2 travel alert for

Wuhan, China Wuhan (, ; ; ) is the capital of Hubei Province in the People's Republic of China. It is the largest city in Hubei and the most populous city in Central China, with a population of over eleven million, the ninth-most populous Chinese city and ...

because of his and his colleague's three-day long on-the-ground experience in that city from 13 January to 15 January 2020. They told a news conference in Taipei one day later that 30 percent of the Wuhan patients had no direct exposure to the

Huanan Seafood City The Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (), simply known as the Huanan Seafood Market (''Huanan'' means ' South China'), was a live animal and seafood market in Jianghan District, Wuhan City, the capital of Hubei Province in Central China. ...

market (HSCM), which the Chinese authorities indicate as the epicenter of the outbreak. The Chinese had closed down the HSCM on 1 January. Chuang's revelation on 16 January predates by three days the Chinese confirmation of human-to-human transmission. On 20–21 January the

World Health Organization The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of h ...

then sent to Wuhan a delegation, which reported on 22 January that human-to-human transmission was indeed occurring. The Chinese government allowed a total of ten foreign medical officials to visit, including two from Taiwan, one of whom was Chuang. The eight others were from

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

and

Macau Macau or Macao (; ; ; ), officially the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (MSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China in the western Pearl River Delta by the South China Sea. With a pop ...

. At the 16 January conference, Chuang remarked on the case of "a married couple infected in Wuhan. The husband worked at the market, but the wife, who had not recently been to the market due to limited mobility, might have contracted the illness from her husband." Chuang also was among the first to report that the SARS-CoV-2 infections were occurring in clusters. Chuang stated later, in an interview for ''

The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was fo ...

'' that: Chuang "received no response to his questions about why 13 infections could not be traced to the (HSCM) seafood market." The WHO declared a

PHEIC A public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) is a formal declaration by the World Health Organization (WHO) of "an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the internatio ...

on 30 January.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chuang, Yin-ching Taiwanese epidemiologists Kaohsiung Medical University alumni Academic staff of the National Cheng Kung University Taiwanese hospital administrators COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan Taiwanese civil servants Year of birth missing (living people) Living people