Taipei residents who stay at hotels in the city during their 14-day mandatory quarantine period are eligible to apply for the city’s NT$7,000 subsidy, with online applications to be launched next week.
Taipei Deputy Mayor Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) on Monday said Taipei residents who have COVID-19 Health Declaration and Home Quarantine Notice dated after March 19 and a quarantine hotel receipt for the dates covered by the quarantine period, would be eligible for the subsidy.
The Taipei City Government on Sunday told the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) that so many city residents are under home quarantine that about 90 percent of the city’s quarantine hotels are full, she said.
Photo: Shen Pei-yao, Taipei Times
Some residents have reported being rejected by other hotels after informing them that they have been ordered into quarantine, she said, she said.
“The city government hopes these quarantined city residents would inform the [non-quarantine] hotels about their situation, so that such hotels can take enhanced precautionary measures,” Huang said.
The hotels can also contact the Taipei Department of Information and Tourism or the Department of Health for assistance if they have guests under quarantine.
As of Monday, there were more than 10,900 people under home quarantine in Taipei after returning from abroad, and people are worried about the increased risk of infection, as well as the heavy burden on borough heads, police officers and officials responsible for monitoring those in quarantine, she said.
If city government thinks that the nation has sufficient testing capacity, more Taiwanese returning from Europe and the US should be tested, she said.
Returning Taiwanese should also be asked to return home in groups every 14 days to avoid putting a strain on the city’s quarantine capacity, Huang said.
Huang was asked yesterday if the city government would require all passengers to wear masks when taking the bus or the mass rapid transport system, following the CECC’s suggestion that the public practice social distancing, but she said it depended on the supply of masks.
It would be more reasonable to enforce a mandatory mask-wearing regulation if there was a sufficient supply of masks, but the decision was up to the center, she said.
However, if the center does announce such a policy, the city would enforce it, she added.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS