The government has donated 500,000 masks to Canada, while at least 120,000 Taiwanese have joined a humanitarian aid initiative by donating their share of masks to other countries through a mobile application to help them contain the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Miguel Tsao (曹立傑) handed over the donations to Canadian Trade Office in Taipei Executive Director Jordan Reeves at a ceremony in Taipei on Wednesday last week, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a news release yesterday.
The masks are to be to distributed to front-line healthcare workers and First Nations peoples, with 400,000 going to the Canadian government, 50,000 to Ontario, and 25,000 each to Alberta and British Columbia, it said.
Photo taken from the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei's Facebook page
The Canadian government last week said that about 1 million KN95 respirators — which it considered a viable alternative to N95 masks — purchased from China failed to meet the required filtering standards and would not be distributed to healthcare workers, the Globe and Mail reported on Thursday last week.
Excluding the gift to Canada, Taiwan this month has donated more than 18 million masks to 15 diplomatic allies, the US, 19 European nations, countries targeted by the government’s New Southbound Policy, Latin America and Caribbean countries, and Japan.
In addition, at least 120,000 Taiwanese have agreed to donate their unused share of masks — nine adult masks or 10 children’s masks per 14 days — to other countries through a mobile app, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) said yesterday.
The app, developed by the National Health Insurance Administration, allows members of the public to make the donation by clicking “respond to humanitarian aid” on the app, which Chen, who heads the Central Epidemic Command Center, unveiled on Monday.
Taiwan now produces nearly 17 million masks per day, up from a daily output of 1.8 million in January, 3.2 million in February, 10 million in the middle of last month and 15 million at the beginning of this month, Ministry of Economic Affairs data showed.
Daily production is expected to reach 19 million in about two weeks after the government conscripts 22 more mask production lines from the private sector, Minister of Economic Affairs Shen Jong-chin (沈榮津) said yesterday.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has said that daily mask production could reach 20 million.
While the price of melt-blown nonwoven fabric — the key material used in making medical masks — in other countries has jumped to 10 times higher than that before the pandemic, the economics ministry said it has more than 19 tonnes of such fabric every day to support the daily production of nearly 20 million masks.
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