Passengers on Taipei’s MRT metropolitan railway system are required to wear masks for the duration of their trip with immediate effect, regardless of whether they can maintain social distancing, the Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) said yesterday.
Anyone who fails to comply to the rule — which was reinstated after several foreign nationals tested positive for COVID-19 after returning to their home countries from Taiwan — would be denied service and fined of up to NT$15,000, it said.
Three foreign nationals, two from Japan and one from Thailand, were diagnosed with COVID-19 after returning from Taiwan in June, last month and this month, officials have said.
Contact tracing for two of those cases, involving a Japanese student and a Thai worker, has been completed, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said on Wednesday.
There was no risk of community spread from those three cases, the center said.
However, the case of a Japanese engineer, who tested positive on Sunday after returning to Japan, is still being investigated, as is the case of a Belgian man who tested positive last week in Taiwan, the CECC said.
The CECC reiterated that people should wear masks in enclosed spaces, including medical care centers, schools, religious centers, markets, performance and entertainment centers, on public transportation, and in areas with large crowds.
The center said that many people had stopped wearing masks in most spaces once the nation’s disease situation had eased.
Compulsory mask wearing on Taipei’s MRT was relaxed on June 7, after no new domestically transmitted cases had been reported since April 12, according to CECC data.
Since then, passengers have not been required to wear masks on the MRT if they could maintain social distancing of at least 1.5m to other passengers.
However, wearing masks for the duration of their trips has remained obligatory for passengers who have a fever or respiratory symptoms.
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