Taipei and Taoyuan yesterday reported that individuals who were under orders to self-regulate their viral status attended New Year’s Eve events, although they were all approached and persuaded to leave, with their detection facilitated by a digital system that detects signals from mobile devices.
Taipei Deputy Mayor Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) said that medical personnel at New Year’s Eve events had asked the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) to send word to the Taipei City Government should anyone listed as being under self-health management be reported within a 650m radius of city-run events.
The Taipei Police Department sent text messages to such people, informing them that those under self-health management were not allowed to attend, Huang said.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
Those who were still in the area 10 minutes after the message were followed up with a phone call from the city government, she said.
About 30 such people were reported at events on Thursday night and left within 20 minutes of receiving the text message or phone call, Huang said.
The city government is looking into the whereabouts of the people involved, she said, adding that most people had remained in the hotel or residence registered as their location for the period of self-health management.
Photo: RITCHIE B. TONGO, EPA-EFE
The Taipei Tourism Bureau estimated that only 38,000 people attended the city’s New Year’s Eve event, a record low.
In Taoyuan at the Mayday New Year’s Eve concert, CECC standards — including requiring attendees to show identification — helped police extract five people at the event who had been ordered into self-health management, Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) said.
The municipality would fine them for breaches of the Communicable Disease Control Act (傳染病防治法), Cheng said.
The five were wearing masks and told officers that they were unfamiliar with pandemic prevention regulations, he said, adding that officers escorted them to their residence or other accommodation.
While the people found to have contravened the law would certainly be fined, the amount has yet to be determined, the Taoyuan Department of Health said.
Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), the CECC’s spokesman, said that the cities’ New Year’s Eve events were the first events at which the CECC had tracked mobile phone numbers via its Digital Fence System 2.0 to identify people ordered into self-health management.
The system monitors the signal from a phone that has a number registered to a person under self-health management, allowing personnel at the events to detect when such people are within a certain distance of the site, Chuang said.
The system only targets people who are under self-health management and does not keep track of everybody, he said.
The third edition of the system, which began development in June, is a handset-based tracking system that allows the CECC to identify and locate individuals under quarantine, isolation or self-health management via triangulation.
When asked why such people were not stopped before they entered the events, Chuang said that the system was being used for the first time on Thursday and the CECC was still calibrating it.
People should follow the law and those who breach the rules face fines of NT$10,000 to NT$150,000, while people who break quarantine rules could be fined NT$60,000 to NT$300,000, he said.
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