Taitung County has failed to provide Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) with guidance regarding disease- prevention efforts, members of the Tao community in the township said, while also calling for a ban on tourists.
Lanyu Elementary School dean Syamen Womzas on Wednesday said that the township office should refuse visitors for the time being.
The Philippines’ Bataan Province on the island of Luzon has already restricted access, he wrote on Facebook.
Photo: CNA
“It is not a choice between money or our lives, it is how we address the issue,” Womzas said.
Womzas said the island has always lacked adequate medical resources and would be greatly affected if COVID-19 were to spread on the island.
Only civil servants and Orchid Island residents should be permitted to enter or leave the island, he said.
Lanyu Township Mayor Chiaman Chialamu said that the Tao community was worried and had asked that authorities at ports and airports take visitors’ temperatures.
However, the township office only had two forehead thermometers, which was only enough to satisfy the township office’s needs, Chialamu said.
Taitung County should provide the island with epidemic-prevention equipment, Chialamu said, adding that even though the county had three COVID-19 cases in home quarantine, it had not given the township any instructions or advice.
Taitung County Public Health Bureau Director Huang Ming-en (黃明恩) said that the county was also short on thermometers and Lanyu Township would have to purchase its own.
Huang said that he would provide the township office with a list of vendors for reference.
In related news, three people — from the US, Australia and India — attempted to enter the country by sailing into Houbihu (後壁胡) in Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁) area, hours before the ban on foreigners entering the country went into effect yesterday.
After confirming that they did not have symptoms of COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control allowed them to enter the country, but asked them to perform self-health management.
They had been visiting Taiwan for more than two weeks as of Thursday last week, and were attempting to visit the Philippines, but when they were refused entry there, they returned to Taiwan, the Pingtung County Public Health Bureau said yesterday.
The Pingtung County Government said that as of Wednesday, it had two people in home quarantine and 150 in home isolation.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods