The Sheraton Hotel in Taipei will give out 200 NT$100 boxed lunches for NT$1 each to celebrate its reopening after a three-day closure for disinfection against SARS, a hotel spokesman said yesterday.
From noon today, the hotel will put 200 freshly prepared boxed lunch on sale for only NT$1 each, in a promotion that will last until Wednesday.
To avoid chaos, a Sheraton spokesman said, the hotel will begin to hand out numbered chips to customers at 11am. Once the 200 lunches are sold out, the 201st will be sold at its original price of NT$100, the spokesman said.
The hotel closed on May 23 for disinfection after a doctor from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Chelsey Richards, who had stayed at the hotel since mid May, developed a fever and other SARS-like symptoms.
Richards, who arrived in Taipei on May 15 to help with investigations into the SARS outbreak in Taiwan and to offer in-hospital infection-control counseling, checked out of the hotel last Thursday and checked into the Shin Kong Wu Ho Su Memorial Hospital (
In related news, a top health official's wife published a letter on Saturday rebutting media reports that Richards "stealthily took [anti-fever] pills."
"He did not lie," Liao Ya-hui (
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