Taipei residents diagnosed with COVID-19 should remain under house quarantine for 17 days, effective immediately, Taipei City Deputy Mayor Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) said yesterday.
The announcement followed the Central Epidemic Command Center’s (CECC) most recent policy asking people diagnosed with COVID-19, but who show no or only mild symptoms, to remain in home quarantine to prevent hospitals from being flooded with patients.
People who exhibit symptoms and cannot quarantine at their registered residence would be moved to hotels set up with isolation facilities for 10 days, Huang said.
If after 10 days they no longer exhibit COVID-19 symptoms and doctors approve their release, they would be allowed to quarantine at home for a week, she said, adding that the hospital or screening stations would have designated taxis transport them to their home.
Taipei hospitals have been at or near capacity dealing with patients exhibiting mild or no symptoms who were previously unable to leave due to epidemic prevention restrictions, but as of yesterday, these patients can be moved to designated quarantine facilities, Huang said.
This would resolve issues of people arriving at hospitals where there were no available beds in isolation wards, she added.
There was also a significant discrepancy in the number of available hospital beds the CECC sees in its system — 682 — compared with the 20 available beds that the Taipei City Government’s data show, she said.
The situation at hospitals is in constant flux, and the CECC cannot know what is going on without being present, she added.
“We are coming up daily with ways to simplify procedures to allow medical personnel to see to more people,” she said, urging the public to give hotels and staff working around the clock more encouragement and empathy.
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