People who vote in the local elections on Saturday despite being ordered to quarantine risk a two-year prison term or a significant fine, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said on Friday, estimating that 50,000 to 70,000 eligible voters would have to quarantine due to COVID-19 that day.
In a telephone interview with the Central News Agency, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), who is the CECC’s spokesman, said that confirmed COVID-19 cases who leave quarantine and infect others face a maximum penalty of two years in prison or a fine of NT$200,000 to NT$2 million (US$6,416 to US$64,164), as stipulated in 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規定).
People who test positive for the disease trough a self-administered rapid antigen test should book a physical or virtual appointment with a doctor as quickly as possible, Chuang said.
Earlier on Friday, Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Victor Wang (王必勝), who heads the CECC, told a news briefing that 50,000 to 70,000 eligible voters would be in mandatory quarantine on election day.
Asked whether people who tested positive in an at-home test, but had not been confirmed as infected by a doctor, could vote, Wang said that those cases are “difficult to regulate.”
Those people should stay at home to avoid infecting other people voting in the local elections and referendum on lowering the voting age to 18, Wang said.
People who have a fever or respiratory symptoms — which might be due to COVID-19 — should use designated passageways at polling stations to socially distance from other voters, he added.
The CECC urged people to get vaccinated with the new Moderna bivalent vaccine adapted to the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of SARS-CoV-2, saying that the vast majority of cases confirmed in the past few weeks had the BA.5 variant.
An earlier updated version of the original Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was adapted only to the Omicron BA.1 subvariant, the center added.
However, with Omicron remaining dominant, also in other countries, both Moderna vaccines are more effective against the disease than earlier COVID-19 vaccines, it said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,