A majority of people agree that the nation should participate in the World Health Assembly (WHA) under the name “Taiwan” and strive for regular participation, a survey released yesterday by the New Power Party (NPP) showed.
While 65.1 percent of respondents supported the nation participating in the WHO’s decisionmaking body under the name “Taiwan,” 27.2 percent said that it did not matter what name or status it used as long as it could participate, the survey found.
Taiwan attended the WHA as an observer from 2009 to 2016, but has been denied entry since because of pressure from Beijing.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Of the respondents, 77.5 percent said they believe the government should continue to try to participate in the WHA annual meeting next month, while 15.3 percent said it should not.
Meanwhile, 35.9 percent of respondents “very much support” changing the name of the CPBL to the “Taiwan Professional Baseball League” following reports that people in other countries have mistaken the league for a Chinese one.
Due to Taiwan’s efforts in curbing the spread of COVID-19, the CPBL was able to hold its first game at Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium on April 12, making it the first professional baseball league in the world to open its season this year.
Of the respondents, 26.4 percent said they “fairly support” the proposal to rename the league, 14.6 percent said they “do not really support” it, 11.3 percent said they “very much do not support” the idea and 11.8 percent said they had “no clear opinion.”
The survey also showed that 17.7 percent of full-time or part-time workers said they have been asked to work reduced hours or take unpaid leave due to the pandemic.
Of the respondents, 70.5 percent were either “very optimistic” or “fairly optimistic” about the development of the pandemic, compared with 25.4 percent who were either “not very optimistic” or “very pessimistic,” it showed.
However, these responses were collected before the Central Epidemic Command Center on April 19 reported 21 COVID-19 infections among navy personnel who had been aboard one of three ships in the navy’s “Friendship Flotilla,” the NPP said.
The poll also found that a majority of respondents supported tax cuts to curb the economic impact of the pandemic.
The survey, conducted on April 17 and April 18 by Trend Survey and Research Co, collected 813 valid responses from people aged 20 and older.
It had a margin of error of 3.44 percentage points.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching