Extracurricular winter sessions at all schools in Taoyuan have been canceled with immediate effect, as the city battles a community cluster of COVID-19 cases that has now reached 15, Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) said yesterday.
School facilities will not be available for winter camps or any other activities, such as volunteer group or student club meetings, Cheng said, after the city on Sunday recorded two more cases in the COVID-19 cluster that started at Taoyuan General Hospital.
Following the end of the fall semester last week, elementary and junior-high schools were scheduled to start supplementary winter classes yesterday, but the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) on Sunday announced that about 5,000 people would have to go into home quarantine as part of its efforts to contain the disease.
Photo courtesy of the Taoyuan City Government via CNA
The 5,000 include patients who were discharged from the hospital from Jan. 6 to 19, and their close contacts, the CECC said.
City government officials said that most of the 5,000 are people who live in Taoyuan, with an estimated 500 in New Taipei City, more than 40 in Taipei and two in Keelung.
Cheng yesterday said that the CECC home quarantine order has been the “biggest challenge” for the city since the outbreak began, given the large number of people required to quarantine.
Photo: Lin Kuo-hsien, Taipei Times
The Taoyuan Department of Public Health is responsible for notifying those who must quarantine, while other branches of the city government provides assistance to implement the order, he said.
A service center is to be set up to offer online medical consultation and other assistance to those in quarantine, Cheng said.
With 15 COVID-19 cases confirmed in the Taoyuan community cluster, all large-scale gatherings that had been scheduled to take place in the city before the end of next month have been either canceled or postponed, he said.
The city’s COVID-19 disease prevention efforts include disinfection of business districts, major transportation hubs and other public areas, he said.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, smartphone maker HTC Corp and several other high-tech companies that have factories in Taoyuan are taking steps to prevent further spread of the disease.
Hon Hai said that employees at its Taoyuan factory have been advised to avoid traveling outside the city, and that it has suspended its shuttle bus service between its factories nationwide.
HTC in a statement said that employees at its Taoyuan plant who can work from home have been asked to do so, and all of its staff meetings have been moved online, while its shuttle bus service between its headquarters in New Taipei City’s Sindian District (新店) and its factory in Taoyuan has been suspended.
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