Before you board your flight to Taiwan, you are supposed to tell the govt. where will you quarantine for 8 days.
You can choose a quarantine hotel or a one-person-per-residence thing, which is what I suppose a studio apartment is, if you happen to already rent out one.
The quarantine hotels are usually north of 2000NTD/night. Which is IMO very expensive, more expensive than the quarantine hotels in Norway actually.
The interesting part is, you can find normal “non-quarantine” hotel rooms for around 500NTD/night.
Am I going to get ripped a new one by the Taiwanese govt for trying to stay in one of these instead? any stories?
I don’t think it’s really a “choice” per se. You can either stay in a quarantine hotel or your home here, if you have one, and subject to whatever the regulations are this afternoon.
Yes, you’re being ripped off. Thank you for supporting the local hotel industry.
(Edit: Sorry, I misread that, but you can’t stay in a regular hotel, and yes you would be ripped a new one.)
If you have an apartment here, OP, or can “borrow” one, there is absolutely no need to stay in a quarantine hotel. Any apartment will do as long as you’re the sole occupant.
Friend came back from overseas this month having had booked a Q hotel for the required 8 nites upon return to Taiwan. Got the Q taxi to the hotel and was told 2 days into her stay that her C-19 saliva test from TPE came back +. She was moved to a C-19 + Q hotel where she said the lobby had been transformed into a mini hospital.
She received a 5-day refund on her VISA credit card from her original hotel & was never charged for the 5 days at the C-19 + hotel.
Lesson to be learned here is that it’s best to return to Taiwan C-19 + as your lodgings will be taken care of by the Gov’t.
Your mistake, I suggest, was asking permission from some low-level functionary - who will inevitably err on the side of covering his own ass rather than giving you the correct information - instead of just looking at the rules as written and making your own judgement call.
If you’re referring to August last year, the rules were a lot more stringent. At this point, nobody cares.
There are really only three possibilities here: you live in a really weird apartment that has some particular feature explicitly forbidden by the rules; you erroneously decided that your apartment was not suitable; or you phoned some guy at the Department of No who said No.
99.9% of apartments are acceptable according to the rules as written, and in practice the authorities are happy to overlook grey areas. So unless you live in one of those outlier locations, then I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that you did one of the other two things.
In any case this isn’t about you. The fact that you personally, for whatever reason, found your apartment unsuitable doesn’t alter the fact that almost any other random apartment will be OK for quarantine purposes. You’d have to really go out of your way to find one that isn’t.
No individual street address for each unit, combined with (as I have learned) angry phone calls to building management from the health authorities telling them that 3+4 was NOT permitted in that building.
From September 1, I have been told, +4 will be permitted in my building given the liberalization of the rules that will take effect starting that day.
That sounds a bit unlucky, so did your building management stop you or did the heath authorities? How were you redirected to the hotel? Assuming it’s not one of those chopped up units with multiple spaces inside, it sounds like someone is on a power trip or something.
The building management contacted all of us—not me individually—to tell us 3+4 is not possible in that building. If you wish to re-enter Taiwan, they announced, you’ll need to go to a quarantine hotel.
Since one cannot get on an aircraft bound for Taiwan without having completed the MOHW online form, indicating exactly where one will be staying during the quarantine period, I went and booked a quarantine hotel.
And no, the 500+ units in my building are not “chopped up” units; they are all stand-alone units in a high rise building.
Do you own your apartment? I would not have caved in, I don’t believe they have any standing to decide. For us nobody cared one bit, we filled our address (which does not have a unique street number like most new apartments don’t) and not one person asked about our house or its layout. It sounds like the management doesn’t want to deal with deliveries maybe?
It sounds shady AF. What kind of building doesn’t have proper addresses? How do they distribute mail? I remember topofan faced a similar situation, but it wasn’t because his apartment was unsuitable; it was because his neighbours and the building management were Olympic-class cnuts. Depressing as this situation might be, it doesn’t somehow prove that “not all sole occupancy units are eligible”. It just proves that afterspivak’s building managers are cnuts. As of now there are very few official restrictions on where you quarantine.
EDIT: can’t help wondering if the tentacles of corruption extend a bit further than one would expect. The building industry is notoriously corrupt anyway, so I wonder if large developers have to pay a fee to the health authorities to get their buildings “approved” even if they are compliant with the officially-published rules? It’d be pointless going after small buildings, of course, but a 500-apartment complex would offer rich pickings - they do, after all, have some serious income from management fees. Maybe in this case they refused to deliver the required lubricant.
Looks like you were the victim of a pointless and arbitrary rule someone made up under the guise of epidemic prevention. Had that happened to me, I suspect it would have made me question the usefulness and logic of certain other rules also made up under the guise of epidemic prevention. Still, rules are rules, and hopefully it felt nice to do your bit to help “keep new variants out” (or whatever the purported purpose of the rule is).
In a complex of 500+ units and with over 20% of Taiwan’s population having tested positive now even according to official statistics, it seems reasonable to assume that the building management hasn’t managed to keep the complex COVID-free despite implementing rules like this. I assume they can’t (or haven’t tried to) prevent confirmed local cases doing their 7/8-day home quarantine in the building?
I wonder if there’s some special rule for very large residential buildings, given the previous evacuations of some such buildings earlier. I doubt that would make much sense anymore, but maybe it exists and hasn’t been relaxed.