The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday said its “1922” hotline does not have the authority to dispatch ambulances or disease prevention vehicles, after the father of a two-year-old who died of COVID-19 said the hotline took too long to respond to his call for help.
The two-year-old boy, nicknamed En En (恩恩), began showing symptoms on April 13, was diagnosed with COVID-19 and admitted to an intensive care unit the next evening. He died of septic shock and brainstem encephalitis induced by COVID-19 on April 19.
He was the nation’s first case of a child dying from COVID-19 complications.
Photo: Chou Hsiang-yun, Taipei Times
His father has since last week been asking the CECC and the New Taipei City Government why it took 81 minutes to find an ambulance to take his son to hospital.
En En’s father on Monday was allowed to visit the New Taipei City Fire Department to listen to the audio recording of the 119 telephone calls between his wife and the department on April 14.
However, a netizen claiming to be a former firefighter at the department on Tuesday wrote that department officials on Monday morning asked its staff to pretend that they were making and receiving emergency calls, and turned the volume up when En En’s father visited the department.
The department on Tuesday evening said the scenario was meant to simulate the actual situation on April 14 for En En’s father to understand how it was busier than usual that evening.
En En’s father yesterday said that he had made two calls to the CECC’s 1922 hotline on the same day — the first at 5:38pm and the second at 6:08pm — to say that his son had lost consciousness.
The case was transferred to the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Northern Regional Center at 8:44pm, and the center took another 12 minutes to contact the New Taipei City Department of Health, he said.
En En’s father said it was “unacceptable” that it took 143 minutes — from when the second call ended at 6:21pm to when it contacted the regional center at 8:44pm — for the case to be transferred.
He showed a formal letter sent by the CDC on Wednesday last week, in response to his request for the hotline’s records of handling his son’s case, which showed that the hotline operator had suggested that he continue calling 119 or the local health department, and that as the case involved the need for medical assistance, it was transferred to the regional center.
The CECC yesterday issued a news release saying that its 1922 hotline’s duties include consultation services about disease control, quarantine, vaccination, isolation, testing and infectious disease information, but it does not have the authority to dispatch ambulances or disease prevention vehicles.
It said the hotline operator would tell the caller how to handle the situation when it receives such calls and later follow up on the case, and that the boy’s family had been informed about the procedures.
Additional reporting by CNA
STRONG RELATIONSHIPS: China would not blockade Taiwan, because President Xi respects him, and Russia would not have invaded if he were president, he said Former US president and the Republican candidate in next month’s presidential election Donald Trump said he would impose additional tariffs on China if China were to “go into Taiwan,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported. “I would say: If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you, at 150 percent to 200 percent,” Trump was quoted as saying in an interview with the WSJ published on Friday. Asked if he would use military force against a blockade on Taiwan by China, Trump said it would not come to that because Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) respected
The Taipei Department of Transportation discouraged YouBike 2.0E users from taking them on long-distance trips after a Taipei city councilor said that riders often use the new electric bike, YouBike 2.0E, to climb Yangmingshan (陽明山). Taipei earlier this year began offering the first 30 minutes of YouBike 2.0 rentals for free, with Taipei and New Taipei offering the YouBike 2.0E on Aug. 30 to encourage rider usage. For YouBike 2.0, the rate is NT$10 per 30 minutes within the first four hours, NT$20 per 30 minutes for five to eight hours and NT$40 per 30 minutes after eight hours. Meanwhile, for e-bikes,
RESOURCE RICH: Taiwan is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire and has up to 30 gigawatts of the potential energy, of which 10 gigawatts could be economically viable Academia Sinica and CPC Corp yesterday began drilling the nation’s first deep geothermal well in Yilan County’s Yuanshan Township (員山). The 4km-deep well is expected to take 18 months to complete and has an estimated investment of NT$337 million (US$10.54 million), Academia Sinica President James Liao (廖俊智) said. “While Taiwan has up to 30 gigawatts of potential deep geothermal energy, with an estimated 10 gigawatts being economically viable, only by digging wells can we determine the actual amount of commercially viable geothermal energy,” Liao said at the project’s opening ceremony. Data collected during and after the excavation process would be used for future
HACKERS’ MARKET: Chat logs about Taiwan and documents outlining ways to take over online accounts were leaked from a company that sells data from hacks Taiwanese cybersecurity specialists found 577 leaked documents which show that the Chinese Communist Party is engaging in “cognitive warfare” against Taiwan through cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns, a documentary released last month by Japanese public broadcaster NHK showed. The filmmakers behind Tracking China’s Leaked Documents said they spent six months visiting seven countries, including Taiwan, where they interviewed members of TeamT5, a malware research and cybersecurity firm, which found the leaked documents. TeamT5 said they discovered a string of mysterious URLs on the social media platform X, which they suspected could be accounts created by hackers or people who leaked data, which led