Taiwan CDC COVID Dashboard - 6/5/21
#15,999
Less than a month ago (May 7th) Taiwan was considered one of the world's great COVID success stories, having managed - over the first 15 months of the pandemic - to accrue fewer than 1,200 domestic cases and 12 deaths (see screenshot below).
Most days, since their first wave in March of 2020, they could count the number of local cases on the fingers of one hand. And they did so, quite remarkably, without having to remain in perpetual lockdown.
But the wheels began to fall off in early May, with a cluster of cases reported in and around the quarantine areas of the Novotel hotel at Taoyuan International Airport.
By the 15th of May, Taiwan was reporting scores of new domestic cases each day, and the President of the Republic of China (Taiwan) - Tsai Ing-wen - announced an increase to Level 3 of their pandemic response in Taipei and New Taipei.Japanese media reported that in mid-April Taiwan reduced the quarantine period for unvaccinated pilots and flight crews from 5 days to 3, and removed the quarantine requirement for vaccinated crew members on Taiwanese airlines.
In the 3 weeks since then, Taiwan has seen their domestic case count swell more than 8-fold (n=10,956), and the number of deaths (n=224) increase 18-fold.
While it seems likely that the introduction of one or more COVID variants (B.1.1.7, B.1.617.x, P.1, etc.) into Taiwan may have played some role in this dramatic upswing, thus far Taiwan's CDC has been pretty silent on the issue.
From now on, work such as migrant workers' change of employers will be suspended to reduce the flow of people and prevent the spread of the epidemic
Release Date: 2021-06-05In view of the severe local epidemic situation, the movement of migrant workers between factories and between factories should be absolutely prohibited. The Central Epidemic Command Center stated today (5) that the local government and the Ministry of Labor should assist migrant workers of an electronics factory in Miaoli to avoid leaving the dormitory, and cooperate with the local government during this period to reduce unnecessary outings of migrant workers. Reduce the occurrence of migrant workers clustering.
The command center pointed out that employers and intermediary companies are requested to cooperate in handling the following matters
from now on :
1. From now on, for the unnecessary transfer of migrant workers to new employers, operations will be suspended during the third level of alert.2. From now on, for the dispatch of workers from different factories of the same employer, the dispatch will be suspended during the third level of alert.3. It is true that the Ministry of Labor has issued the guidelines for hiring and hiring migrant workers for severe and special infectious pneumonia employers to handle epidemic prevention.
The command center emphasized that based on domestic epidemic prevention and safety, the Ministry of Labor and local governments will in the near future conduct visits to enterprises with more than 500 migrant workers and large-scale migrant dormitories with more than 100 people, and supervise employers and intermediaries to implement epidemic prevention guidelines and invite labor. The Ministry plans to subsidize enterprises to improve the epidemic prevention environment in dormitories to strengthen epidemic prevention capacity.
