Former vice president Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁), an epidemiologist, earlier this year said that as the highly transmissible but less severe Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 became the world’s predominant strain of COVID-19, a “zero COVID” strategy is no longer practical, and people should be prepared to live with the virus. He said the “three treasures” preventing the healthcare system from being overwhelmed by severe cases and death are “vaccines, rapid tests and antiviral drugs.”
Taiwan in the past two years had implemented strict border control measures and domestic restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus in local communities. This helped buy time for the arrival and distribution of vaccines. However, as vaccine uptake slowed and daily cases began to surge, rapid test kits and antiviral drugs took on a more essential role.
The sudden demand last month for rapid tests, which at the time cost about NT$300 each, almost depleted the nation’s stocks. A rationing system was implemented on April 28 and the price was fixed at NT$500 for a pack of five. However, people still need to wait in lines at pharmacies to buy the limited supplies, which often run out before everyone can buy one. Taiwanese questioned whether the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) had made adequate preparations for the Omicron wave.
By Monday, the situation seemed to be addressed as single test kits were being sold at eight chain retail stores in northern Taiwan, but lines still formed outside pharmacies, and several industries are still in need of tests for their workers. Adding to the pressure, government-funded polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing stations and emergency rooms have been crowded by people waiting for hours to be tested.
New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) and Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) have repeatedly called for rapid test results to be enough to confirm a case, so that PCR testing would not stress healthcare capacity. Ko also urged for antiviral drugs to be prescribed to people whose rapid test show a positive result. The CECC partly agreed to their request by allowing people in quarantine or isolation to confirm their results with a doctor via a video call as of Thursday.
Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC, on Friday said that there are legal and medical concerns, as rapid tests can produce false positive results. Prescribing antiviral drugs to people who falsely test positive for COVID-19 would be inappropriate and problematic.
Giving doctors the means to prescribe antiviral drugs accurately and efficiently to cases at higher risk of severe COVID-19 illness is a challenge for the government. Taipei has procured 700,000 courses of Paxlovid, the main COVID-19 oral antiviral drug, although fewer than 1,000 courses had been prescribed as of Monday.
The CECC in the past week has simplified prescription procedures and expanded channels for patients to receive Paxlovid faster — it needs to be taken within five days of the onset of symptoms. However, many people are having trouble booking a telemedicine appointment, and some are not meeting the government’s criteria for obtaining the drug.
Local infections are expected to reach their peak around the end of this month. The CECC and local governments must cooperate to improve the efficiency of COVID-19 testing and how Paxlovid gets prescribed. Keeping severe COVID-19 cases and deaths as low as possible is essential to safely riding out this wave of the pandemic.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS