Contact tracing with digital assistance in Taiwan’s COVID-19 outbreak response

•Robust contact tracing with an integrated system effectively intervenes early transmission of COVID-19 in Taiwan.•Developing an integrated management system to support traditional contact tracing is critical in response to control the spread of COVID-19.•Management tools augment the capacity and decrease workloads of contact tracers, which improve contact tracing effectiveness. Comprehensive case investigation and contact tracing are crucial to prevent community spread of COVID-19. We demonstrated a utility of using traditional contact tracing measures supplemented with symptom tracking and contact management system to assist public health workers with high efficiency. A centralized contact tracing system was developed to support data linkage, cross-jurisdictional coordination, and follow-up of contacts’ health status. We illustrated the process of how digital tools support contact tracing and management of COVID-19 cases and measured the timeliness from case detection to contact monitoring to evaluate system performance. Among the 8051 close contacts of the 487 confirmed cases (16.5 close contacts/case, 95% CI [13.9–19.1]), the median elapsed time from last exposure to quarantine was three days (IQR 1–5). By implementing the approach of self-reporting using automatic text-messages and web-app, the percentage of health status updates from self-reporting increased from 22.5% to 61.5%. The high proportion of secondary cases detected via contact tracing (88%) might reduce the R0 to under one and minimize the impact of local transmission in the community. Comprehensive contact tracing and management with complementary technology would still be a pillar of strategies for containing outbreaks during de-escalation or early in the next wave of COVID-19 pandemic.