The Executive Yuan should review the distribution channels of surgical masks to meet the demand of 1.7 million children returning to school on Feb. 11, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus said yesterday, amid fears of a local outbreak of a novel coronavirus that was first discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
There has been a shortage of masks at drugstores and convenience store chains, despite the Cabinet on Thursday announcing a plan to centralize their distribution, KMT caucus secretary-general Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) told a news conference at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei.
If even masks for adults could not be purchased at these places, masks for children must be harder to find, Chiang said, adding that this has worried many parents.
Photo: Chen Yun, Taipei Times
The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday dispatched consignments of masks to convenience stores, but did not include online shopping platforms, he said, urging the Cabinet to swiftly add them to its distribution channels.
Judging by the production rate of masks, the output of children’s masks constitutes only about 10 percent of total output, translating to about 390,000 masks per day, KMT Legislator Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔) said.
As parents of kindergarteners are frantically shopping for masks, the Cabinet should ensure sufficient supplies of children’s masks before elementary and junior-high-school students return to school, she said.
The government could take the initiative to dispatch masks to schools when classes begin, she added.
Classrooms could be vulnerable to cross-contamination and are potential vector sites for the virus, KMT Legislator Hsieh Yi-fong (謝衣鳳) said, adding that the situation could turn into community-wide outbreaks if the virus is taken home by schoolchildren.
Apart from dispatching masks to convenience stores and e-commerce platforms, the government should also distribute them to school clinics and local health centers, where they would be accessible to teachers and students, she said.
KMT Legislator Chen Yu-chen (陳玉珍) called on the government to work more closely with couriers to give people advance notices on its Web sites on when and where they can buy masks, so that they would not panic over supplies running out.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,