People will be allowed to send up to 30 masks to family members abroad from Thursday next week, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday as it announced an easing of restrictions, including to allow people to buy up to nine adult masks or 10 children’s masks every two weeks.
Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center, said that as domestic mask production has begun to meet demand, the restrictions were eased on mask purchases using National Health Insurance (NHI) or Alien Resident Certificate cards.
People will be allowed to send up to 30 adult masks, or about two months’ supply, to first or second-degree relatives living in other countries per mail package every two months, he said.
Photo: CNA
Taiwanese living abroad with NHI cards can preorder masks online and ask family members to collect and send them, or people in Taiwan can share their own masks, Chen said.
While there is a mask shortage in many other countries, the CECC encourages people not to waste them just because they are allowed to purchase more starting next week, he said.
“From April 9, for people’s convenience, the limit for buying children’s masks will be changed from five masks per seven days to 10 masks per 14 days, meaning people can buy the maximum amount for two weeks in one visit,” Chen said.
“The change to the rules on purchases of adult masks is proportionally greater, with the three-mask-per-seven-days limit rising to nine per 14 days,” he said.
The rules dictating which days cardholders can buy masks would be removed, meaning people would be allowed to purchase them on any day, but only one type of mask — those for adults or for children — could be bought at a time, he said.
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
TRICKED INTO MOVING: Local governments in China do not offer any help, and Taiwanese there must compete with Chinese in an unfamiliar setting, a researcher said Beijing’s incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China are only intended to lure them across the Taiwan Strait, after which they receive no real support, an expert said on Sunday. Over the past few years, Beijing has been offering a number of incentives that “benefit Taiwanese in name, while benefiting China in reality,” a cross-strait affairs expert said on condition of anonymity. Strategies such as the “31 incentives” are intended to lure Taiwanese talent, capital and technology to help address China’s economic issues while also furthering its “united front” efforts, they said. Local governments in China do not offer much practical
PUBLIC POLL: More than half believe Chinese drills would make Taiwanese less willing to unify with China, while 36 percent said an invasion was highly unlikely Half of Taiwanese support independence, according to the results of a poll released yesterday by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, which also found that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) support rating fell by 7 percentage points. Fifty percent of respondents supported independence, 25.7 percent supported maintaining the “status quo” and 11.8 percent supported unification, while 12.1 percent had no opinion, did not know or refused to answer, the foundation said. Support for independence is the new mainstream opinion, regardless of which party is in power, foundation chairman Michael You (游盈隆) said. Insinuations that Taiwan wants to maintain the “status quo” are a fabrication that
RSS