Seventy new cases of COVID-19 were yesterday reported by the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC): 58 imported and 12 local, with nine of the local cases linked to an airport cluster and three to a new Taipei hospital cluster.
As of noon yesterday, 39 local cases had been linked to the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport cluster.
Of the nine new airport cluster cases, two were family members of two previously infected airport janitors, said Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center.
Photo: CNA
The family members tested positive in home isolation, he said.
Also added to the airport cluster were three family members and four colleagues of previously infected cases.
Chen said that one family member — case No. 17,573 — is the mother of a child who contracted COVID-19 at the same after-school childcare center as another infected child, whose father (case No. 17,473) handles baggage carts at the airport and whose mother (case No. 17,472) is a personal care aide.
Photo: CNA
The two other family members are people who live three previously reported cases, including a man (case No. 17,471) who receives care from the female personal care aide (case No. 17,472), he said.
Five people in the family have tested positive, including two young children under the age of five, their parents and their uncle (case No. 17,471), he added.
Chen said that the four colleagues are employed at the same electronics manufacturing company as a previously reported case (case No. 17,507), who is a close friend of the personal care aide (case No. 17,472).
As the company has five cases of COVID-19, the Taoyuan City Government asked it to suspend operations yesterday, while the infected colleagues’ 280 workplace contacts were admitted to a centralized quarantine facility, he said.
On Monday evening, a new cluster of infections was reported at a hospital in Taipei, CECC specialist advisory panel convener Chang Shan-chwen (張上淳) said.
The first confirmed case in the cluster — case No. 17,570 — is a nurse in the hospital’s ward dedicated to caring for COVID-19 patients, Chang said.
Ward personnel are tested regularly for the virus, Chang said, adding that the nurse had tested negative on Friday, but had a sore throat on Sunday and a fever on Monday.
She tested positive on Monday and all ward personnel were immediately tested, Chang said.
Another nurse — case No. 17,571 — tested positive, but she is asymptomatic, Chang said, adding that the ward personnel were placed in isolation.
The cycle threshold values of the two nurses were relatively low — 13 and 15 — indicating higher viral loads, he said.
A close friend of case No. 17,570 had a sore throat on Monday and also tested positive later that day, he said.
Yesterday, Taipei Deputy Mayor Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) said that the two nurses work at Taipei City Hospital’s Zhongxing branch, and the close contact of case No. 17,570 is her boyfriend.
Yesterday, Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) said that all elementary schools in the city would start winter break one week early, with the last day of classes being on Friday.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B