Chen is claiming that the China Airlines pilots and 3+11 is NOT what led to our huge 3 month outbreak (he says it was a relatively small cluster that was contained) and the two events happening at the same time were basically a coincidence. I overall like Chen, but I don’t know if I believe him and I feel this is something his DPP overlords asked him to say… it wouldn’t be the first time he spouted a DPP talking point during one of these pressers.
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I just can’t believe we’re down to one case in the wild and I still have to wear my mask to hunt the yeti in yangmingshan.
They just hosted Lollapalooza in Chicago. 110,000 people a day. No masks outside were worn. Bastards. (Only 203 confirmed cases 
)
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Todays update, more imported cases than local (for those want detailed info see press release attachment on imported, nation, dates, ages, contacts,had vaccine or not, ect )
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So, do you think he was straight out lying?
Wow, talk about doublespeak. You conclude they’re unconnected, but cannot rule out they’re connected? Outbreaks don’t just appear out of nowhere in a (previously) Covid Zero country. If Chen is making the claim that the China Airlines pilots were not the cause, that’s a mighty big coincidence that he needs to give a satisfactory explanation for. I’ve heard him mention no other possible starting points for it though.
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微說謊
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I don’t know. Could range from possibly pressured into saying something that has not been 100% proven, to outright lying on DPP’s orders. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but saying it was not this thing that happened at the same exact time goes against Occam’s razor, of the simplest explanation being the most likely one. If not the pilots, then where the hell did it come from? Chen has said stuff in the past that makes him sounds
a bit like a mouthpiece for DPP, and we know one of their legislators was a guiding force behind 3+11. I’m not that conspiratorial in general, but this raises a huge eyebrow with me.
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I was wondering what happened to my daily new cases post - then i found it in the Taiwan Vaccination thread, it can stay there for today.
Was 4 + 14 = 18 plus 2 deaths.
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Huge eyebrow raised, indeed. 
If you’re saying Minister Chen is untrustworthy in this particular instance, then do we think him claiming, “Coincidence!” is limited solely to these events? Or could it be possible he might be untrustworthy on other topics related to Covid, and when it suited his political agenda? 
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One obvious explanation is that it has been here all the time and/or that it’s been entering from multiple sources, and the only reason anybody noticed an “outbreak” is a massive ramp-up in testing rates.
Rather more pragmatically, they probably don’t even know where it came from. The idea of tracing any infected person back to an ultimate source is scientifically dubious. Yes, it can be done, up to a point, but you’d have to throw far more resources at it than (I suspect) the CECC actually have available, or are prepared to use. And even then there’s no guarantee of success.
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I think he’s fairly competent in how he directs the CECC to tackle the outbreak and some of the info he supplies is helpful, but I feel DPP forces him to echo their talking points sometimes or spin information that puts them in a more positive light, and if so this would be a particularly egregious example of that. I just don’t buy there was another leak happening at the exact same time that we weren’t aware about until now.
The thing that made me start doubting some of the stuff released by the CECC was the claim of the R number decreasing from 15 to 1.02, where the initial value was presumably an artifact of suddenly doing more testing.
“1.02”? Quoting something that is inherently hard to guesstimate to two decimal places suggests that something is seriously amiss.
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It’s not obvious, because there wasn’t a huge amount of people dying every day and the hospitals weren’t getting overwhelmed like they were in late May. Even if the government tried to cover up an epidemic in its own borders, doctors have little allegiance to them and someone would’ve blown the whistle on them.
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Contract tracing is only as good as the honesty of those being asked, and the evidence available. That so many contacts were traced was amazing in my opinion, and Taiwan seemed to be far better at tracing than anyone else (perhaps only the PRC traced more).
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I’d be interested to know exactly what resources the CECC actually have. I mean they’ve said they’d investigate 400 vaccine deaths to determine if they need to pay anyone. 400 autopsies? That’s a lot. Can they even do it?
They would need to have decided soon after the death, as cremations somehat interfere with the Autopsy process.
Sounds quite scandalous when you think about the ramifications, if true.
I would think so.
COVID Hospitalisation and fatality rates are so low that they could have easily vanished into the general ebb-and-flow of respiratory illnesses that clog up Taiwan’s hospitals. A total of ~800 deaths have been declared in Taiwan. There are 400 hospitals. So even during this “outbreak”, most hospitals won’t have seen more than a handful of cases at any given time.
There isn’t much of a whistle-blowing culture in Taiwan, IMO. Doctors were discouraged from running COVID tests during 2020 (because Taiwan was “COVID free”) and they weren’t even readily available, so nobody would have ever been able to say for certain that any particular old person dying of respiratory disease was COVID. The pressure to comply would have overwhelmed any urge to insist on a COVID test, I reckon.
They weren’t “overwhelmed”. I was an inpatient at a large hospital during the supposed peak of the crisis. The idea that the health service was on the verge of collapse was complete bollocks made up by the media.
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