The military had plans to seal off Taipei in May because of the spread of SARS, defense sources said yesterday.
The plans were to stop all departures from the city and allow only authorized SARS fighters to enter. If this was to happen, it would have been a great test of the military as it would have been responsible for controlling the flow of people in and out of the city.
All military hospitals in the city would then have been turned into SARS hospitals to accommodate a possible huge influx of infected people. These included the Tri-services General Hospital, widely regarded as the nation's best military hospital.
The plans to seal off the city were not realized because SARS was brought under control. Another reason was the government's concern that the proposed action might trigger panic among the public.
A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the plans were prepared for the worst that could happen in Taipei because of the SARS outbreak, but that they were not needed in the end.
Minister of National Defense Tang Yao-ming (
"Tang's civilian counterparts insisted, for instance, that the Tri-services General Hospital should be converted into a SARS hospital. The hospital is the largest and best in the military.
"Civilian government officials knew only that the hospital could accommodate a lot of patients. They did not consider the consequences, though," the official said.
"Tang objected to the arrangement because the Tri-services General Hospital is the last place that the military could afford to sacrifice in the fight against SARS. We did everything we could to help civilians combat SARS. But the spread of the disease did not worsen to the extent that we had to seal off Taipei and give up all our resources," he said.
In May, when SARS hit the nation the hardest, the military enforced a few other emergency action plans to maintain its command and control of the forces across the country.
The military's strategic command in Taipei's suburban Tachih District, known as the "Hengshan command," could have been paralyzed because of a few SARS infections, as it is located inside a mountain.
To prevent this scenario, a reserve strategic command was set up temporarily at a base in Taoyuan, sources said.
The reserve strategic command could still give orders to all units across the country if Taipei and central command were sealed off.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching