Taiwan has donated 10,000 doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to two Caribbean allies to help them combat the pandemic, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
Taiwan’s ambassadors to Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines donated the AstraZeneca doses to the local health ministers on Thursday and on Monday respectively, the ministry said in a statement.
The vaccine doses would support the health and welfare of the Caribbean nations’ residents, the ministry said, adding that it had been confirmed that Taiwan had enough AstraZeneca doses for its own use.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs via CNA
The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) last week said that Taiwan has 2.5 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that are to expire in May.
NEW CASES
In related news, the CECC yesterday reported 53 new cases of COVID-19 — eight locally transmitted and 45 that originated overseas — but no new deaths from the disease.
Two of the new domestic patients are linked to a cluster in Yilan County, while the other six are connected to a cluster involving a Kaohsiung family and a tour group, the CECC said.
In terms of vaccination status, six of them had received either two or three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, one had received one dose of AstraZeneca and one is unvaccinated, it said.
Of the 45 imported cases, 18 tested positive upon arrival, it said, without giving details regarding their vaccination status.
The cluster in Yilan originated with a woman in her 50s who returned on Feb. 10 from the US, the center said.
The woman tested negative upon entry and on her seventh day of quarantine, and opted to spend the rest of the quarantine period at home, during which she tested positive.
Her older sister, who had helped to deliver food to her, subsequently tested positive, as did a coworker.
The two new cases linked to the cluster are family members who the woman’s sister had visited prior to testing positive.
Including the woman who returned from the US, the cluster has five cases, the center said, adding that the cluster involving the Kaohsiung family and a tour group now has 17.
It is highly likely that the cluster is connected to a different cluster infection in northern Taiwan, it said.
A patient in one cluster had visited the home of a patient in the other cluster, but the CECC said it has not yet been able to identify the original source of the clusters.
The center said that it is monitoring three clusters of unknown origin.
As of yesterday, Taiwan had confirmed 20,922 cases of COVID-19 since the emergence of the pandemic in late 2019, including 15,472 locally transmitted cases.
The number of fatalities in the nation resulting from COVID-19 remained at 853.
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