Coronavirus - Taiwan Open July 2021

Taiwan Living in Taiwan
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21

Whoa, great number.

Any Delta news?

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No new Delta cases added today, but there is still mass testing going on so we can’t celebrate anything yet.

Taiwan is really doubling down on quarantine measures. From Brian Hioe:

PCR testing to take place for all inbound travelers, before they enter quarantine, and before they released. Rapid test to occur 10 to 12 days into quarantine as well.

This should really cut down on any variants whatsoever.

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This is what they should’ve been doing for the last year. It was pure luck that we didn’t have a serious outbreak until May of this year (and being on restrictions from that outbreak may have ironically saved us from a worse Delta outbreak now).

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Migrant workers, who currently aren’t allowed to change jobs, will now be allowed to change jobs provided that they get PCR tested before starting the new job. CDC wants the employer to bear the cost of the PCR tests, but knowing these Taiwanese employers they might just transfer the burden onto those migrant workers instead.

Note that Taiwanese employees don’t have to get PCR tests for switching jobs, even though they might be working at the same place.

CDC is fixing a discriminatory policy with another discriminatory policy. Just great!

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The Law doesn’t seem to mean much to these guys. Buried racial memories of mercurial Chinese emperors bubbling to the surface, perhaps?

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It’s not discrimination when you consider a group of human as sub-human to begin with. That’s their thinking.

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Any indication of how many of today’s reported cases are already in isolation? That seems to have been a pretty good marker of how things are doing.

Guy

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I haven’t been here for long, but even friends who’ve stayed for 5+ years didn’t know about some migrant worker specific laws (such as you MUST return to home country after 12 years).

It took a pandemic to bring their plight into the limelight. Shameful!

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There’s been other news stories over the years about migrant abuse when people have taken notice. But the usual response is “oh how horrible” and then their goldfish memory forgets a week later.

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Ignorance is not an option if you consider that migrant workers make more than 80% of the foreign population in Taiwan.

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It could all be for nowt though when there’s a gaping hole in Taiwan’s COVID net that will just let airplane workers and pilots do a limited quarantine. Baffling why that is still such a thing.

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What’s so wrong with a requirement to return to home country if these are people allowed entry as migrant workers not immigrants.
Many countries have a “guest worker” category. Return home is part of the deal.

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Taiwan really does treat migrant workers as absolute garbage. I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve alweays been kinda aware of it havng dated a few Phillipinos who told me how tough things could be—but I’ve kinda never been aware of how badly until the pandemic.

Herding them into the dorms and monitoring them to make sure they don’t go out is absolutely shameful, and I can’t believe there hasn’t been more of an uproar about it or an international reaction. Especially when it’s Taiwanese who keep breaking the quarantine rules.

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It forces migrant workers to keep paying onerous fees to brokers and other middle men.

It’s also a pain in the &ss for some employers that might actually want to retain good workers.

Give these guys—at least the medium skilled ones—a path to residency! It would be a win win situation for all.

Guy

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Granted, 12 years is a long time to be a “guest worker”. As far as I know, such categories are usually for seasonal workers on farms our hospitality industry…

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It’s just a white washed terminology for slaves.

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English article about the fire in Changhua…since the building’s construction in 1993 there have been four fires.

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38

Scrolling through various twitter feeds, I found this:

https://twitter.com/brianhioe/status/1410479211962277891

So that means 26 cases were caught today “in the wild” (i.e. out in the community). This is very good news indeed.

Guy

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I dont get what that means? I thought we counted those in quarantine as overseas rather than domestic. All those months we didnt have domestic cases, there must have been someone developing synmptoms while in quarantine.

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I am distinguishing between “quarantine” (mandatory for arrivals into Taiwan) and “isolation” (where contacts of confirmed cases are asked to stay isolated and out of the community).

When the latter are tested and come out positive, of course this is not good news for them individually, but it is good news for us collectively, as that means they were not out there spreading the virus.

So the numbers today are, for these reasons, arguably even better than they appear.

Guy