Two Taiwanese men who returned from Cambodia were each fined NT$100,000 (US$3,507) for breaching quarantine regulations by visiting a convenience store before entering a quarantine hotel, the Kaohsiung Department of Health said yesterday.
The men, both in their 20s, returned on Nov. 25 and were placed under mandatory 14-day home quarantine, the department said in a news release.
A borough official the next day discovered that the men were not obeying quarantine rules of one person per room with a bathroom, as one of them stayed in a room with his girlfriend and the three of them shared a bathroom, so they were taken by a disease-prevention taxi to a quarantine hotel that evening.
However, when the two men arrived at the hotel, they ignored the taxi driver’s warning that they were required to enter the hotel directly, and headed to a nearby convenience store instead.
The taxi driver informed the Kaohsiung City Government of the incident, and public health personnel and police arrived to exhort the men to check in at the hotel.
The department also issued a citation, as the men had already breached home quarantine regulations.
The men were later taken to a centralized quarantine facility and fined, it said.
According to the Special Act on COVID-19 Prevention, Relief and Restoration (嚴重特殊傳染性肺炎防治及紓困振興特別條例), individuals who are ordered to quarantine at home, but leave the quarantine site on their own or breach other quarantine rules can be fined NT$100,000 to NT$1 million, the department said.
The city government has placed 154 people under compulsory centralized quarantine for going outside during mandatory quarantine, and imposed fines totaling more than NT$20 million, it said.
The department earlier this month also said that a migrant worker from the Philippines was fined NT$100,000 for stepping outside of his room into the hallway of his quarantine hotel for only eight seconds.
The department urged people to follow disease-prevention policies and not contravene the law, saying that the city government would impose heavy penalties on people who break quarantine.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS