Workers can turn in their COVID-19 isolation notification form any time within 30 days after the end of their isolation or quarantine period, the Ministry of Labor (MOL) said yesterday, as the nation recorded 85,720 new domestic cases.
The measure, which took effect yesterday, applies to employees who could not immediately give their employers official health notices requiring them to quarantine or isolate due to system delays, which have led to an uptick in labor disputes, Deputy Minister of Labor Wang Shang-chih (王尚志) said at the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) news briefing.
Employees who are confirmed to have COVID-19 can apply for sick or injury leave, while those in self-isolation after being listed as a contact can apply for pandemic prevention leave, he said.
Photo: Lin Hsin-han, Taipei Times
Those in the latter category who display no symptoms are free to return to work, should they wish to do so, he said.
Those who need to stay home to care for an isolating child can request family care leave or pandemic prevention care leave, he said.
The COVID-19 certification Web site would on Wednesday next week be upgraded to reduce the waiting time for quarantine or isolation notices from 24 hours to between five and 10 hours, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) said.
Chen, who also heads the CECC, said that the quarantine notification system would be separated from the National Infectious Disease Reporting System to enhance their efficiency.
The nation yesterday recorded 85,720 new domestic COVID-19 cases and 49 deaths, down slightly from the 90,378 new infections and 59 deaths reported a day earlier, the CECC said.
The 49 deaths were people in their 30s to 90s, the CECC said, adding that 21 of them were unvaccinated, while 14 had received three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.
All but one had chronic illnesses or severe diseases such as cancer, it said.
The youngest people who died were two men and a woman in their 30s, who were all unvaccinated and had a history of underlying diseases, CECC data showed.
On Thursday, the CECC announced that people who have recovered from a COVID-19 infection are now exempt from any contact listing for the three-month period after they first tested positive.
This means they would not have to follow isolation or self-health monitoring rules if listed as a contact, Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞), deputy head of the CECC’s medical response division, said at the news briefing.
The protocol has been changed based mainly on research that shows COVID-19 immunity can last for at least three months after an infection, Lo said.
Furthermore, people such as healthcare workers and medical staff who have recovered are highly likely to come into frequent contact with COVID-19 patients, which makes it impractical to list such workers as contacts while they have immunity, Lo said.
Over the past two years, there have been only 457 confirmed COVID-19 reinfections in Taiwan, he said, citing data valid as of Monday.
However, people who have recovered from COVID-19 but develop symptoms of the disease after coming in contact with an infected person are advised to get a rapid test or a polymerase chain reaction test, Lo said, adding that if they test negative, they would be exempted from any contact listing.
Taiwan is projected to lose a working-age population of about 6.67 million people in two waves of retirement in the coming years, as the nation confronts accelerating demographic decline and a shortage of younger workers to take their place, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan experienced its largest baby boom between 1958 and 1966, when the population grew by 3.78 million, followed by a second surge of 2.89 million between 1976 and 1982, ministry data showed. In 2023, the first of those baby boom generations — those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s — began to enter retirement, triggering
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