As the COVID-19 pandemic becomes increasingly severe, there have been several instances of people who tested positive for the disease hiding information from investigators during contact tracing. To ensure that all confirmed cases and their respective contacts tell the truth during contact tracing, people should stop encouraging witch hunts and ridiculing confirmed cases.
As the number of COVID-19 cases in Taiwan has been low, most people have looked at every case as exceptional. Under such circumstances, the public has focused on the movement of confirmed cases and speculated about their private lives as they tried to figure out how they had been infected. That approach does little to help the situation, and it could even punch a hole in the nation’s epidemic prevention armor.
Take, for example, a large cluster of COVID-19 infections that started at a local hostess teahouse in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華). After Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) said one confirmed case had been engaged in “person-to-person contact” with a hostess at such an establishment, the case was widely discussed by the general public.
Many people have read too much into what Chen said and even mocked the infected person. However, in practice, we constantly have interpersonal contacts with the people we work with every day: Are these contacts not also “human-to-human contacts”?
While many links might have been drawn between the “teahouse culture” in Wanhua and sexual services, society has overlooked that such teahouses can also be venues for finding companionship, where patrons can drink tea with their friends or sing karaoke.
Just like many small eateries, teahouses offer people at the bottom of society a certain emotional outlet and support. Even if sexual contact is involved, that should not be much of a concern to the general public.
Reviewing the private lives of COVID-19 patients does more harm than good. Particularly in the face of the public’s groundless projections and overinterpretations of official’s comments, it is quite easy to imagine how ill at ease this would make those involved in teahouses feel in a society such as Taiwan, where sex still carries a stigma.
If society at large becomes used to such a witch-hunt culture, people would think that it has nothing to do with them personally, so do nothing to try to curb it, and they might even join the hunt, laughing at those being targeted. If they themselves become the center of a disease source investigation someday, how many of them would be brave enough to tell the truth when the outside world puts them under a magnifying glass? This would only make disease prevention efforts even more difficult.
Now is the critical moment that would decide if the pandemic would slow over the next few weeks. As responsible citizens, all we can do is strictly comply with the government’s disease prevention measures, stop forwarding or sending messages from an unclear source, and stop initiating witch hunts by discussing the private lives of people who have tested positive.
If we all manage to do that, we should have a real chance of fixing the broken safety net, and rebuilding our homeland into a strong democratic fortress.
Lin Shu-heng is a journalist.
Translated by Eddy Chang
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
In an article published on this page on Tuesday, Kaohsiung-based journalist Julien Oeuillet wrote that “legions of people worldwide would care if a disaster occurred in South Korea or Japan, but the same people would not bat an eyelid if Taiwan disappeared.” That is quite a statement. We are constantly reading about the importance of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), hailed in Taiwan as the nation’s “silicon shield” protecting it from hostile foreign forces such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and so crucial to the global supply chain for semiconductors that its loss would cost the global economy US$1
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
Sasha B. Chhabra’s column (“Michelle Yeoh should no longer be welcome,” March 26, page 8) lamented an Instagram post by renowned actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) about her recent visit to “Taipei, China.” It is Chhabra’s opinion that, in response to parroting Beijing’s propaganda about the status of Taiwan, Yeoh should be banned from entering this nation and her films cut off from funding by government-backed agencies, as well as disqualified from competing in the Golden Horse Awards. She and other celebrities, he wrote, must be made to understand “that there are consequences for their actions if they become political pawns of
RSS