The nation is opening its doors to two additional categories of foreign students for the fall semester, the Ministry of Education (MOE) said yesterday.
Taiwan first reopened its borders to foreign students in August last year and allows students who fall in one of four categories to enter the nation.
The two new categories are “exchange students who are enrolled in a Taiwanese school through an education cooperation agreement signed with a foreign school” and “students [including Hong Kong and Macau residents] who are enrolled in Mandarin-language programs that last two months or longer.”
Photo: CNA
The former would be allowed to enter Taiwan from Aug. 1, while the latter have been allowed entry since Friday, the ministry said.
The students would be subject to the “3+4” quarantine policy upon arrival in Taiwan: three days of home quarantine followed by four days of disease self-prevention, it said.
They can quarantine at a hotel or at their dormitories after obtaining the approval of the local health department, it added.
Students at universities without quarantine facilities can contact the ministry to find accommodation at a centralized quarantine facility, it said.
The ministry would continue to conduct rolling reviews of the foreign student entry program, based on the Central Epidemic Command Center’s (CECC) COVID-19 regulations, it added.
Separately, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), who is the CECC’s spokesman, said 25,251 local and 45 imported COVID-19 cases were reported yesterday, as well as 73 deaths.
The new local caseload is down about 10 percent from Saturday last week, he said.
Of the deceased, 47 people (65 percent) were aged 80 or older, 65 (90 percent) had cancer or other underlying health conditions and 52 (72 percent) had not received a booster vaccine, he said.
The youngest of the deceased was a woman in her 40s who was unvaccinated. She died of pneumonia and respiratory failure on Wednesday, the same day she was diagnosed with COVID-19.
Taiwan has reported 4,184,399 local cases so far this year, he said. Of those, 19,055 were moderate-to-severe cases, including 7,520 deaths Chuang said, adding that 99.55 percent of all cases were asymptomatic or mild.
The CECC on Friday reported the nation’s first community case of the Omicron BA.5 subvariant of SARS-CoV-2 — a woman in her 20s who did not travel to other countries in the past six months.
Five close contacts of the woman tested negative in polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, Chuang said yesterday.
Her mother is suspected of being the infection source and the local health department has identified seven of the mother’s colleagues for PCR testing, he said.
Six of the colleagues were asymptomatic, while one had symptoms and previously had COVID-19, Chuang said, adding that their test results have yet to come.
He said 56,778 doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered on Friday, bringing the nation’s first, second and booster dose vaccination rates to 91.43 percent, 85.43 percent and 70.84 percent respectively.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
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