The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) should turn the complete minutes of meetings leading to a decision to shorten the quarantine time for members of airline cabin crews over to the Legislative Yuan’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee, the New Power Party (NPP) said on Saturday.
Relaxing the quarantine requirement in April — from five days of quarantine and nine days of self-health management to three days and 11 days respectively — was widely perceived to be the main cause for the development of a COVID-19 cluster among China Airlines Ltd (CAL) cargo pilots.
The pilots were later found to have contracted the more transmissible Alpha variant, which first emerged in the UK.
The cluster partially led to a nationwide COVID-19 outbreak.
The NPP made the remarks after Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers, who hold a majority in the Legislative Yuan, on Friday voted down a motion proposed by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers to make the meeting minutes public.
In a meeting hosted by DPP Legislator Fan Yun (范雲) on April 1, she reportedly recommended that government officials allow the members of airline cabin crews to quarantine for three days and practice self-health management for nine days, saying that the policy should be implemented on April 11.
“We ask the CECC to hand over all of the meeting minutes related to the decision to shorten the quarantine time for airline pilots and flight attendants to the Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee, including those that have yet to be reviewed or approved by the center,” the NPP said.
The party said it doubted that an investigation to be launched by the Executive Yuan regarding the decisionmaking process would uncover the truth.
“Lawmakers answer to the people and should not wait for the Executive Yuan to finish investigating itself,” the NPP said.
“As the Executive Yuan has yet to offer a clear explanation regarding what caused the COVID-19 outbreak to spread, we believe that we should use such documents to help us find the truth,” the party added.
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