Taiwan’s latest COVID-19 outbreak might not yet have reached its peak, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday, as it reported 216 new domestic cases — the highest daily tally this year — as well as 65 imported cases.
Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center, said that the 216 local cases were reported across 12 cities and counties.
New Taipei City reported 91 cases, followed by 33 cases in Keelung, 28 in Taipei, 13 in Hsinchu County, 11 in Taoyuan, 10 each in Kaohsiung and Hualien County, eight in Hsinchu City, five in Taichung, three each in Changhua and Yilan counties, and one case in Tainan, he added.
Photo: CNA
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞), deputy head of the CECC’s medical response division, said that contact tracing was as of yesterday morning still being conducted for 80 cases, so their connection with previous cases remained unknown.
Of the cases associated with previous clusters, 34 cases are linked to a large cluster in Keelung, 31 are linked to a cluster involving schools and students’ relatives in New Taipei City, 16 are linked to a cluster involving a wedding banquet in Taichung and 12 are linked to a cluster involving an apartment building in New Taipei City’s Jhonghe District (中和).
New clusters include seven cases at a school in Taipei, six in a family in New Taipei City, six at a bank in Taoyuan, and seven involving two families and a close contact, Lo said.
New cases in the apartment building cluster were detected by expanded community testing, so the cluster needs to be closely monitored, Chen said.
In the wedding banquet cluster, 13 of the new cases tested positive during isolation, so the cluster seems to be almost under control, he said.
However, the local COVID-19 situation might not yet have reached its peak, as several local chains of transmission remain active, Chen added.
Daily case tallies seem to show an expanding situation, he said.
One of the new cases is a woman in her 60s with diabetes and moderate COVID-19 symptoms, although she had received a booster shot, Chen said.
She did not get pneumonia and was not in an intensive care unit, but her blood oxygen level fell to between 90 and 92 percent, he said, adding that the hospital was treating her with the medication remdesivir and her vital signs were stable.
Asked whether people with mild or no symptoms might isolate at home, Chen said that there is so far adequate capacity at centralized quarantine facilities and enhanced disease prevention hotels.
The option might be considered if the daily case tally exceeds 1,500 people, he said.
The nation’s first, second and booster dose vaccination rates had as of Monday reached 83.49 percent, 78.47 percent and 50.93 percent respectively, he said.
Asked about the number of breakthrough infections in people with booster shots, CDC Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), who is the CECC’s spokesman, said that as of March 21, there were 169 cases, or 1.6 cases per 100,000 people.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues