A message to students
We are at a crossroads in the COVID-19 pandemic, and I would like to recruit all university students to help make sure we move in the right direction.
We recently had a spike in domestic COVID-19 cases — a small increase compared with the rest of the world, but large for our country. It is something we need to wisely respond to. If the number of daily new cases continues to expand over the next two weeks, it means that COVID-19 has been spreading unnoticed in the community.
The potential is there for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of residents of Taiwan to become infected over the next one or two years. Many would become seriously ill, with an unknown number facing death in hospitals or at home. All of our medical and emergency systems would be pushed to their limits.
However, things do not have to be this way. If the number of confirmed local cases gradually decreases over the next two weeks, we might be able to completely stop the spread of COVID-19. Within a few months we would be able to return to our previously successful pandemic prevention tactics, while distributing COVID-19 vaccines.
How can you contribute? For the sake of yourself, your family, and your friends and classmates, stay home for a week or two. Do not go anywhere. Study, interact with your friends online, catch up on your rest, watch your favorite films. Do whatever you want, just please do it at home.
If your parents have no choice but to travel for work to support your families, remind them to wash their hands, wear masks, carry hand sanitizer and maintain social distance. Do this with kindness and awareness — nagging is not helpful.
If you decide to contribute to your family’s care by doing some grocery shopping, follow the same suggestions. When you return home, wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water, and change into your stay-at-home clothes.
There is no need to turn your homes into prisons. Go out occasionally for a breath of fresh air at a local park, maybe ride a bicycle. Do not take public transportation, and do not go to public spaces with lots of people who are not practicing social distancing.
Most importantly, I ask you to overcome any idea you might have that “COVID-19 happens to other people, but not me. I am different.”
The truth is, all of us are susceptible until the large majority of residents are vaccinated.
If we all do these things, in two weeks or a month we can meet in-person at school, and once again receive international praise for the way our government and its citizens successfully reacted to the outbreak.
Take a break. See you in a month, with the knowledge that we did what was necessary to control the pandemic.
Chung-Yuan Huang
professor, Chang Gung University
Temporary healthcare staff
A Switzerland-based company first introduced temporary staffing to Taiwan in the mid-1990s, and it has since grown at breakneck speed into a multimillion-dollar industry, comprising more than 3 percent of the total labor force.
Employment agencies claim that temporary staffing offers firms hiring flexibility, allowing them to bring on extra staff amid a soaring market, without the risk of overstaffing if the market sours.
When applied to the healthcare system, it seems to create a big issue, and affects people’s health, especially among Taiwan’s rapidly aging population. It can even be harmful to people’s well-being.
Taiwan is undoubtedly one of the healthiest countries in the world, but when it comes to its healthcare system, people always point to poor working conditions at care facilities. Nurses and other medical professionals are expected to work long hours under extremely high pressure for less than NT$200 per hour.
For example, at the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Taichung Hospital, a temporary nurse can only earn NT$160 per hour. While this might benefit people who use medical services, it causes trouble for medical professionals and significantly reduces people’s willingness to become a nurse or other medical professional.
Temporary staffing might seriously affect workers, such as through the stress of chronic job insecurity, no hope of a pension and difficulty in landing a permanent job.
Moreover, a temporary nurse might not fully understand a patient’s health condition, because they only work for a short period during the patient’s treatment. A temporary nurse could also be dispatched to other care units, which creates difficulty for them. As a result, nurses would probably burn out and leave their job.
Taiwan needs skilled medical professionals for its aging society. High quality medical services are needed. Filling medical positions with temporary personnel is not wise, and cannot be used in clinical settings. Such hiring practices dramatically jeopardize jobs and harm people’s health.
Wu Chang-yu
Chiayi County
When 17,000 troops from the US, the Philippines, Australia, Japan, Canada, France and New Zealand spread across the Philippine archipelago for the Balikatan military exercise, running from tomorrow through May 8, the official language would be about interoperability, readiness and regional peace. However, the strategic subtext is becoming harder to ignore: The exercises are increasingly about the military geography around Taiwan. Balikatan has always carried political weight. This year, however, the exercise looks different in ways that matter not only to Manila and Washington, but also to Taipei. What began in 2023 as a shift toward a more serious deterrence posture
Reports about Elon Musk planning his own semiconductor fab have sparked anxiety, with some warning that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) could lose key customers to vertical integration. A closer reading suggests a more measured conclusion: Musk is advancing a strategic vision of in-house chip manufacturing, but remains far from replacing the existing foundry ecosystem. For TSMC, the short-term impact is limited; the medium-term challenge lies in supply diversification and pricing pressure, only in the long term could it evolve into a structural threat. The clearest signal is Musk’s announcement that Tesla and SpaceX plan to develop a fab project dubbed “Terafab”
China’s AI ecosystem has one defining difference from Silicon Valley: It is embrace of open source. While the US’ biggest companies race to build ever more powerful systems and insist only they can control them, Chinese labs have been giving the technology away for free. Open source — making a model available for anyone to use, download and build on — once seemed a niche, nerdy topic that no one besides developers cared about. However, when a new technology is driving trillions of dollars of investments and leading to immense concentrations of power, it offered an antidote. That is part of
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
RSS