Surely it must be politically damaging for Tsai to allow local politicians, school owners, supermarket managers etc to take the lead? Maybe they’re lining the dentist in chief up for the top job?
EDIT: More likely the fear of being blamed. The buck stops downwards.
This is exactly what a Taiwanese friend said to me. It’s all about abdication of responsibility. The same sort of thing happened elsewhere with all that “following the science” BS - the politicians could proclaim themselves blameless and point at their advisers when the peasants came out with torches and pitchforks.
This is flat out illegal.
Learned a new word today. 
Machine translation:
Zero clearance is no longer the epidemic prevention goal of the Central Epidemic Command Center. It is gradually moving towards coexisting with the virus. The number of confirmed cases in Taiwan is also rising day by day. The epidemic adjustment has fallen far short of the speed of the spread of the virus. Chen Shizhong, the commander of the command center, accepted an exclusive interview with Zhou Yukou, the host of the radio program “News Firecrackers”. Chen Shizhong estimated that according to the current epidemic, the number of local cases in Taiwan will exceed 1,000 at the end of April. In response to a large number of patients, fast screening reagents have become the main tool, but at present, the price of fast screening at home is high. He guarantees that the price of fast screening reagents will drop to less than 200 yuan, emphasizing that it will be cheap and the supply is safe.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/udn.com/news/amp/story/120940/6232264
They should really make them free and readily available, like other governments have done, especially when the prize for paying for your own home test and reporting the result is getting locked up.
Good that they’re just now thinking to talk to manufacturers about larger-scale production though. It’s not like they’ve had 18 months to prepare for that…
Let me predict the convo that cram school bosses are going to have next week.
200 dollars……pretty cheap. Please test yourself before coming to school. Only 1000 a week. Think of the poor kids. They couldn’t get vaccinated.
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — With over 200 schools announcing cancelations on Monday (April 11), the Ministry of Education is planning on raising the threshold for suspending classes to one-third of staff and students.
On Monday, the MOE announced that 237 schools in 18 counties and cities had announced either complete or partial suspension of classes, reported the Liberty Times. From April 20, 2021, to Monday, 2,085 students have been confirmed to be infected with COVID, including 971 from colleges and universities, 264 from high schools, 192 from middle schools, 481 from elementary schools, and 177 from kindergartens.
Under current regulations, if two students test positive for COVID, the whole school must close. Amid complaints from parents about frequently disrupted classes, Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) has asked the MOE to draft rules on the criteria to suspend classes due to the virus.
A copy of a draft of the new rules obtained by the Liberty Times states that only when one-third of school staff and students are listed as “confirmed cases” or “close contacts” will a school suspend face-to-face classes. School personnel must conduct self-health monitoring until the test results of close contacts are all negative.
In the event of a confirmed case in a school, the school’s head of epidemic prevention must provide a record of that person’s movements.
If the confirmed case is a teacher, the investigation must include the classes that they taught. If the case is a student, a record of their classes, activities, and students from the same classes must be listed as close contacts. The confirmed case’s class must suspend face-to-face learning for 10 days and can only resume when all students test negative.
If a confirmed case comes in contact with students while taking part in physical education classes, clubs, or riding the bus, activities for these students will be suspended for one to three days. The venues involved must also be cleaned and disinfected, and staff must cooperate with the health department in conducting an epidemiological investigation.
“Non-close” contacts will resume classes one to three days later, while close contacts must undergo quarantine and testing while their face-to-face classes are suspended. Close contacts must all test negative before face-to-face classes can resume.
The MOE has already discussed the draft with local governments and has submitted it to the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) for approval.
Well I guessed this change would happen after a month or all schools would be closed. Someone said more like a week. I guess they are right.
I predict All the bs about classes staying home for 10 days until everyone is negative will be scrapped in a month too. Or kids will be going to school for a few days, then at home for 10. Then back for a few days.
Only thing they can do is say stay home if sick/positive. Anything else is unworkable.
It’s ridiculous .
Yep nobody wants the nightmare of at home virtual classes anymore. Let’s face it it doesn’t compare to in class teaching and parents have to work. Same pattern happened all over the world…Online class fatigue.
This bit doesn’t sound good though.
The problem is, what if over student is COVID positive and the rest of the class are negative?
It’s not really fair to keep one student at home for 10 days where they miss out on significant learning time while the other students study ahead.
Ideally teacher would do in-person learning while also broadcasting online. But that’s not logistically possibly currently.
One students gets it = whole class online is probably the best solution right now. Luckily summer vacation is also coming up.
They could do this. Why is it not logistically poss?
At minimum it would require
Most (public) schools don’t have either.
All teachers taught online last year. From the schools originally.
Where are you teaching?
The 1990’s?
