Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) yesterday urged the Ministry of Health and Welfare to issue “guidelines for living” for people to follow on weekends and holidays amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking to Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Ho Chi-kung (何啟功) at a meeting of the legislature’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee, Su said that before the Children’s Day and Tomb Sweeping Day holiday from Thursday to Sunday, she had advised the ministry to set guidelines on how people should spend the four-day break.
While the ministry asked people to practice social distancing, it fell short of telling people to stay home during the holiday, she said.
Photo: Tang Shih-ming, Taipei Times
“We had originally looked forward to being able to breathe a sigh of relief after this spring break,” she said.
“Now, not only are we not relieved, everyone is more tense,” she said.
After the Central Epidemic Command Center on Saturday sent two text messages warning people to avoid crowded areas and to follow social distancing regulations — at least 1.5m apart indoors and 1m outdoors — people were “very obedient,” Su said.
Roads became empty the day after the messages were sent, she said.
She said she hoped the ministry would set clearer guidelines on what people should do during the upcoming Labor Day weekend and on weekends, and ask people to try to stay home during the pandemic.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Sz-huai (吳斯懷), also a committee member, asked the health ministry to explore the feasibility of working with the Ministry of Education to allow students to pick up their purchases of masks at school.
Many people still have to wait in line to buy masks at pharmacies, Wu said.
With parents at work and children at school, it is often the grandparents who are standing in line, he said.
Ho said while the health ministry would consider the proposal, it might result in the education ministry having to “spend more effort.”
DPP Legislator Hung Sun-han (洪申翰), another committee member, raised the importance of including the homeless population in the fight against the coronavirus.
Homeless people often gather in transportation hubs like Taipei Railway Station — the same places people returning from abroad often pass through — and might be more vulnerable than others to contracting the virus, he said.
They might also be physically weaker due to spending long periods of time outdoors, he said.
He urged the health ministry to help keep homeless people up to date on the latest information about the pandemic and to make washing facilities more accessible to them.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS