The border reopening plan remains unchanged, even though 49,509 new domestic COVID-19 infections were reported, the second-highest since the wave of cases involving the Omicron BA.5 subvariant of SARS-CoV-2 began in August, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday.
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), who is the CECC’s spokesman, said that 49,509 new local cases, 65 imported cases and 31 deaths were confirmed yesterday.
He said the local daily caseload was 8.6 percent higher than that reported on Tuesday last week and the second-highest daily count of the Omicron BA.5 outbreak, only slightly lower than the peak of 49,540 cases reported on Sept. 14.
Photo: CNA
The CECC previously predicted that the peak of the Omicron BA.5 outbreak had passed and Chuang, when asked if the peak could be in the next few days, said it was possible, but generally the situation is at a plateau.
He said the fluctuations in daily caseloads has not affected plans for the nation’s border to be reopened on Thursday next week.
CDC Deputy Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞), deputy head of the CECC’s medical response division, said 9,219 courses of oral antiviral drugs — 7,291 courses of Paxlovid and 1,928 courses of molnupiravir — were prescribed on Monday, the highest number since August.
There is still about one month of Paxlovid and three months of molnupiravir in stock, so physicians do not have to worry about prescribing the antivirals to patients who are eligible to take them, he said, adding that the CECC had already ordered 400,000 more courses of Paxlovid which are expected to arrive in batches starting this week.
Meanwhile, on Monday it was reported that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party legislators had questioned why the CDC proposed an exceptionally high disease prevention budget of NT$84.5 billion (US$2.66 billion) for next year, which is about four-and-a-half times the NT$18.7 billion budget this year.
In response, Chuang said that COVID-19 prevention and response funding in the past three years came mainly from the NT$840 billion special budget allocated based on the Special Act for Prevention, Relief and Revitalization Measures for Severe Pneumonia with Novel Pathogens (嚴重特殊傳染性肺炎防治及紓困振興特別條例), but that the prevention and response budget for next year must be included in the CDC’s annual operating budget.
He said that the COVID-19 prevention and response budget allocated this year was NT$94.3 billion — NT$75.6 billion from the special budget and NT$18.7 billion from the CDC’s annual operating budget — so the proposed budget of NT$84.5 billion is actually NT$9.8 billion less than this year.
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