Taiwan is aiming to ease its strict COVID-19 quarantine policy from next month as it needs to gradually resume normal life and reopen to the world, the government said yesterday.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began two years ago, Taiwan has succeeded in keeping reported cases below 20,000, having enforced a blanket two-week quarantine for everyone arriving in the nation, even as large parts of the rest of the world have reopened.
Speaking at a meeting with senior health officials, Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said that even though there could be further domestic infections, the government was “quite confident” in its disease prevention measures.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
“The government must also take into account livelihoods and economic development, gradually return to normal life and step out to the world,” the Executive Yuan cited Su as saying.
On the precondition that there are sufficient medical supplies and preparations, and that the vaccination rate continues to rise, Su said that he had asked the Central Epidemic Command Center to “consider whether reasonable and appropriate adjustments” should be made to the quarantine and entry policy for businesspeople.
Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center, said that it would aim to cut the quarantine period from 14 days to 10 days before the middle of next month, confident that it could detect any infections within that period with testing.
“Basically, we can relax epidemic prevention” measures, Chen said.
Asked whether quarantine could be done away with completely before the summer holidays, Chen said: “The possibility is not high.”
About 30 percent of the nation’s 23.5 million people have now had a booster dose of COVID-19 vaccine, a figure that is gradually rising, and the government has said that it wants to get that to 50 percent before easing entry requirements.
Taiwan has never gone into full lockdown during the pandemic and has never closed its borders, although arrivals have generally been limited to Taiwanese and foreign resident certificate holders.
Chen said business travelers would be able to return and would have to do the same 10-day quarantine, but he could not offer a time frame on allowing tourists back in.
The center is dealing with a handful of new domestic COVID-19 cases per day, all as a result of the more infectious Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.
Officials have said they are confident they can contain those outbreaks.
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