Starting tomorrow, all Indonesian migrant workers arriving in Taiwan will be placed under centralized quarantine, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday as it reported two new imported cases of COVID-19 infection.
Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center, said that while many travelers from the Philippines have been confirmed with COVID-19 in the past few months, the number of imported cases from Indonesia has also been increasing.
So in addition to requiring all migrant workers employed in the social welfare sector to stay at centralized quarantine facilities upon arrival, as of tomorrow, all Indonesian workers are to be placed under centralized quarantine and receive mandatory COVID-19 testing before leaving quarantine, he said.
An investigation by the CECC and the Ministry of Labor found that four employment agencies in Indonesia that train migrant workers for employment in Taiwan seemed to have inadequate COVID-19 infection controls, so the ministry has temporarily suspended accepting applications from them.
The four are Pt Sentosa Karya Aditama, Pt Vita Melati Indonesia, Pt Ekoristi Berkarya and Pt Graha Ayukarsa, the CECC said.
Twenty arriving Indonesian migrant workers recently confirmed with COVID-19 had been hired by those companies, it said.
However, workers who were trained at those agencies and who obtained an entry visa before today would be allowed to enter the country, Chen said.
Before the agencies can resume hiring and sending workers to Taiwan, they must be recognized by Indonesian health authorities as having improved their disease-prevention measures and their recruits no longer have COVID-19 infections, as well as receive approval from the CECC, center officials said.
Meanwhile, two new imported cases of COVID-19 confirmed yesterday are an Indonesian woman in her 30s and a Taiwanese man in his 60s.
The Indonesian, case No. 607, arrived on Thursday last week and was placed in a centralized quarantine facility, where she developed a sore throat and muscle pain on Saturday, Chen said.
She saw a doctor on Monday after developing a fever, runny nose and sore throat, and her test came back positive yesterday, Chen said.
Two other migrant workers who came to Taiwan with her and 44 other passengers who sat close to her on the flight from Indonesia have been placed under home isolation, he said.
The man, case No. 608, is a permanent resident of the US and returned to Taiwan on Wednesday last week after leaving for the US in October last year, Chen said.
The man did not have any symptoms upon his arrival, but the following day, while staying at a quarantine hotel, he developed a light fever, muscle soreness, a headache, cough and a runny nose, Chen said.
The local health department arranged for him to see a doctor on Monday and be tested, he added.
In other developments, the CECC said it would move Mongolia to the list of medium-low infection risk countries or areas from which short-term business travelers can apply for shortened quarantine periods, as there has been an increase in reports of locally transmitted COVID-19 cases in that country.
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
Broadcasting Corp of China chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康) yesterday said that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) “should not follow the Democratic Progressive Party’s [DPP] direction,” after KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) had said that China posed a threat to Taiwan. Chiang was quoted by Reuters as saying during an interview that China’s “one country, two systems” formula for an unification with Taiwan “has no market” in the nation. Chiang also described China as the major threat to Taiwan, Reuters reported. Jaw, who has expressed interest in running for KMT chairman this year and in the 2024 presidential election, wrote on Facebook that
RSS