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
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching