The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday reported no new domestic or imported COVID-19 cases for the second consecutive day.
The last time the nation had no new cases for consecutive days was 109 days ago, when no cases were reported from Oct. 25 to 27 last year, it said.
Answering questions about a Vietnamese news report that a 39-year-old Taiwanese woman who arrived in Ho Chi Minh City on Jan. 28 tested positive in a second COVID-19 test on Thursday, Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), who is the CECC’s spokesman, said the center has contacted Vietnam’s National IHR Focal Point for details.
Photo: CNA
However, it has not received any response yet, as Vietnam is also celebrating the Lunar New Year holiday, he said.
Although the case might be a false positive, the patient have contracted the disease in Vietnam or might have been asymptomatic in Taiwan, the CECC would “treat it as a domestic case and conduct contact tracing immediately,” said Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center.
“We will not let a spark become a great fire,” he said.
Chen also shared his thoughts after visiting a centralized quarantine facility in Taichung earlier in the day.
“Centralized quarantine facilities are an important line of defense against COVID-19, which can be viewed as an extension of border controls,” he said.
Chen said more than 25,000 people have stayed in centralized quarantine facilities in the past year, and 331 confirmed cases were detected among them, accounting for about one-third of all the confirmed cases in Taiwan.
High-risk people and those who have violated quarantine orders have been sent to stay at centralized quarantine facilities, he said.
Some quarantine rooms were severely damaged after people who broke home quarantine were compelled to stay at the facilities, but facility personnel calmed them down and monitored their health conditions, he added.
There would have been a risk of community spread if a few people broke quarantine, but with the help of specialized personnel at the facilities, no one broke quarantine and no cluster infection occurred, Chen said.
Giving updates on a cluster infection at Taoyuan General Hospital, Chen said 4,346 people associated with the cluster are still under 14 days of home isolation, meaning they spent the Lunar New Year holiday in isolation.
Among the 21 confirmed cases in the cluster, six have been released from isolation, six have mild symptoms, five are asymptomatic, two are on ventilators, one has pneumonia and one has died, he said.
Among 3,423 people associated with the hospital cluster who need to undergo a final polymerase chain reaction test, 3,414 have tested negative, and the remaining nine still need to be tested, he added.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods