Taipei Chief Prosecutor Chen Ta-wei (
"With Center for Disease Control (CDC) officials' advice, we decided to do so because their quarantine period is completed," Chen said yesterday. "Their testimonies will be crucial in deciding whether the hospital should be blamed for the outbreak of SARS last month."
To investigate and decide who should take responsibility for the outbreak, Chen said prosecutors have interviewed more than 20 doctors, nurses, patients and officials in the past two weeks.
Those interviewed include Shin Kong Wu Ho-su Memorial Hospital Deputy Superintendent Huang Fang-yen (黃芳彥), former CDC director-general Chen Tzay-jinn (陳再晉), former Taipei City Bureau of Health director Yeh Chin-chuan (葉金川), current CDC Director-General Su Yi-jen (蘇益仁) and Hoping Hospital's Emergency Room Director Chang Yu-tai (張裕泰).
"Interviews with related personnel are completed. Now, we need to hear what [Wu and Lin] will say," Chen Ta-wei said.
According to Chen, former health director Yeh advised prosecutors to look up the patients' records because they would contain more useful information to help the prosecutors find out whether the Hoping Hospital had been honest and open in its reports to the Department of Health and Taipei's Bureau of Health
Prosecutors asked for access to the patients' files and CDC officials entered the Hoping Hospital on Tuesday to collect the records for March, April and May.
According to the prosecutors' office, prosecutors will expose these files to direct sunlight for more than 24 hours before handling them to make sure that the documents do not carry any SARS virus.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
RISK FACTORS: ‘We hope people can cooperate and endure it ... it is possibly the very important last mile,’ Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung said Taiwan’s COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations are to remain the same next month, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The center reported 42,112 new local COVID-19 cases and 85 deaths, saying that the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has dropped to a new low this month. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC, said that the center is keeping COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations the same due to the local virus situation, and an increase in the number of imported cases of the new Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2, among other risk factors. Easing
GLOBAL STRATEGY: Indo-Pacific alliances need reinforcement to prevent Chinese occupation of Taiwan, which would threaten Japan, Hawaii and Australia, Pompeo said The US should officially recognize Taiwan as a free, independent nation and establish official diplomatic ties, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo told an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Friday. Every US president since Harry Truman has considered Taiwan’s existence to be of utmost importance to US national security, Pompeo said. Taiwan is a principal US partner in technology and economic matters, and if China were to capture Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain, it would severely hamper the US economy, Pompeo said. Should China occupy Taiwan, it would severely weaken US influence in the Indo-Pacific region and its surrounding areas,
RSS