The nation faces five main challenges in the second stage of its fight against COVID-19, Chang Shan-chwen (張上淳), convener of the Central Epidemic Command Center’s (CECC) expert advisory panel, told a conference on COVID-19 policies and strategies in Taipei on Thursday.
The challenges are the continued severity of the global situation; how to gradually lift border restrictions and interact with other nations; how to strike a balance between disease prevention and resuming normal activities; how to avoid a second wave of infections; and how to obtain effective vaccines and drugs, he said.
The last is crucial to future efforts to prevent COVID-19, Chang said.
Photo: Bloomberg
International vaccine trials have been progressing well, and there has also been some progress on the domestic front, he said, adding that he expects the first phase of clinical experiments to begin this month.
If there were a vaccine, the situation would not be as serious as it was before, he said.
Asked whether the low number of confirmed cases in Taiwan had to do with a lack of mass testing, Chang said that while the possibility exists that asymptomatic cases are not being tested, from a disease prevention perspective, there are bound to be people with symptoms, and there would not be no warnings at all.
Experience shows that the virus has not been detected in most of the people tested due to contact tracing, he said.
This shows that Taiwan’s low number of cases is not because of few tests being done, but because the nation is confident of keeping the situation under control without using too many resources, he said.
Asked about reports of people in Japan and Thailand testing positive for COVID-19 after leaving Taiwan, Chang said the Japan case could have been categorized as positive or negative, while the Thailand case was a “weak positive.”
COVID-19 has so far not been detected among the people who came in contact with either case, he said, adding that Taiwanese health authorities respect others’ decision to classify the cases as positive.
National Taiwan University president Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔) told the conference that different economic organizations had forecast that economies around the world would shrink this year.
With the US-China trade dispute changing the global supply chain, Taiwan must consider its role and position in this changing landscape, he said.
Since World War II, the US has led the world, but this time “Captain America” is missing, he said, adding that whether the global social order would still be led by the US is a question.
Taiwan must raise its crisis-awareness and think deeply to be able to stand more firmly and face future challenges, he said.
The conference was hosted by the Taiwan Economic Association, National Taiwan University’s College of Social Sciences and National Yang-Ming University’s research center for disease prevention studies.
Additional reporting by Wu Po-hsuan
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