There would be no discussion on whether to completely lift the mask mandate until next month, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday.
Asked about Hong Kong’s decision to lift its mask mandate today, Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞), the CECC’s spokesman, said that the CECC would not discuss whether Taiwan would further ease its mask mandate until the middle of next month.
Under Hong Kong’s new mask rules, people in the territory do not have to wear masks indoors or outdoors, including on public transportation, but still have to wear them in medical institutions.
Photo: CNA
Lo said that Taiwan’s mask mandate was relaxed on Feb. 20 to allow people to be mask-free in most indoor settings.
The next step would be easing quarantine and reporting rules for people who are infected, he said.
Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Victor Wang (王必勝), who heads the CECC, has said a full lifting of mask requirements could take place in May, but that actual implementation would depend on vaccine coverage and the status of the local outbreak at that point.
Meanwhile, the CECC reported 10,120 new cases of COVID-19 and 40 deaths from the disease yesterday.
Among the new cases, 9,908 were contracted domestically, a 41.4 percent drop from the same day a week earlier, CECC data showed.
The decrease was partly due to the extended holiday for yesterday’s 228 Peace Memorial Day, during which many medical institutions were closed, Lo said.
The daily number is expected to rebound to about 15,000 to 20,000 today and tomorrow, Lo said.
However, the local outbreak is declining as expected and the mask mandate for schools is set to be eased on Monday next week as scheduled, he said.
To date, Taiwan has recorded 10,043,227 COVID-19 infections and 17,948 deaths from the disease since the pandemic began in early 2020.
The CECC has stopped providing daily information on the age distribution and health status of the deceased, and the number of vaccine doses they received.
It is also no longer releasing daily infection numbers for each of Taiwan’s administrative regions.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not