The government is seeking legislative approval to expand its COVID-19 relief fund to pay cash subsidies to families with young children, totaling up to NT$25 billion (NT$90,035 million), a Cabinet source said yesterday.
Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) earlier yesterday convened a Cabinet meeting to discuss a possible budget allocation to aid people affected by a surge in domestic COVID-19 cases this month, Executive Yuan spokesman Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) said.
The Cabinet agreed on prioritizing families with young children and children with disabilities, Lo said.
Photo: screen grab from the Legislative Yuan Parliamentary TV Web site
Families with children who attend elementary school or younger, and children with disabilities who attend junior-high or high school would receive NT$10,000 per child, the source said.
The plan would cost the government about NT$25 billion, as there are about 2.45 million children in those groups in Taiwan, they said.
The legislature is expected to pass an amendment bill expanding the nation’s COVID-19 relief fund from NT$420 billion to NT$630 billion on Monday, they said.
Separately yesterday, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) told a legislative meeting about Taiwan’s efforts to purchase COVID-19 vaccines.
Taiwan People’s Party caucus convener Chiu Chen-yuan (邱臣遠) said that Taiwan’s COVID-19 defense had collapsed due to lax quarantine rules for airline crew members, which lead to cluster infections among China Airlines pilots and workers at Novotel Taipei Taoyuan International Airport hotel.
“Taiwanese know that the origin of this big domestic outbreak is the China Airlines-Novotel infection cluster,” Chiu said, asking whether Chen presided over the meeting where quarantine requirements for crew members were reduced to three days, with 11 days of self-health management.
Chen said that he did not preside over that meeting, adding that the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) at the time believed that shorter rules were sufficient.
Concerning COVID-19 vaccines, Chen said that he expects that
negotiations with the US would lead to the domestic production of US-developed vaccines.
Responding to accusations from lawmakers that the CECC had mismanaged Taiwan’s vaccine supply, as evidenced by the low numbers of doses that have so far arrived in Taiwan, Chen said: “Everyone knows that right now the whole world is fighting over vaccines.”
“We have been working to find vaccines and negotiate procurements, but I am unable to confirm to lawmakers when deals can be made and shipments arrive,” he added.
Taiwan aims to inoculate 60 percent of its population with at least one dose by October, Chen said.
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