MINISTRY CENSURED:
Despite following the government’s guidelines, the parents of a two-year-old who died in April could not receive effective care, the Control Yuan said
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By Lee I-chia / Staff reporter
The daily COVID-19 caseload rose about 43 percent, or by 7,347 cases, from Tuesday last week, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday.
The center reported 24,427 new local COVID-19 cases, 71 imported cases and seven deaths yesterday.
It was the seventh consecutive day that the local caseload posted a weekly increase and new cases increased in all regions, said Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞), deputy head of the CECC’s medical response division.
Photo courtesy of the Central Epidemic Command Center
He said an expected wave of infections would be caused mainly by the Omicron BA.5 subvariant of SARS-CoV-2 and might peak in early February.
People who had contracted COVID-19 in previous waves could be reinfected, he added.
The center reported 5,976 cases of reinfection from Dec. 18 to Sunday and 97,037 such cases from the beginning of this year to Sunday, Lo said.
He urged people, regardless of whether they had been infected previously, to take personal protective measures.
Of the seven deaths, five were unvaccinated and they all had cancer or other underlying health conditions, the center said.
Yesterday, New Taipei City reported the most COVID-19 cases with 4,717, followed by Taichung with 3,123, Taipei with 2,735, Taoyuan with 2,637, Kaohsiung with 2,433, Tainan with 2,141, Changhua County with 1,270, and fewer than 1,000 cases each in the remaining 15 cities and counties, CECC data showed.
Separately, the Control Yuan released its investigation report on the death of a two-year-old boy nicknamed En En (恩恩) in New Taipei City’s Jhonghe District (中和) in April, the first child in Taiwan to die of COVID-19.
The Control Yuan censured the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the New Taipei City Government for their role in the boy’s death.
Control Yuan members said that En En’s parents had followed the government’s COVID-19 prevention and response rules when seeking emergency medical assistance, but they could not receive effective emergency medical care, showing the dysfunction of the central and local governments.
The report said the ministry’s rules at the time banned people under home isolation or quarantine from going to a hospital on their own, but the rule was set for adults and lacked flexibility for children with special conditions.
Although the ministry’s home isolation notice said that people would not be punished for leaving their isolation location for emergency evacuation, most people understood it as referring to natural disasters.
The Control Yuan also corrected the CDC’s 1922 hotline for not setting up a mechanism to report and handle critical emergency cases.
The report said the New Taipei City Government had several errors in its administrative procedures, preventing its health and fire departments from making emergency connections.
Operators at the “119” emergency hotline had to contact the department of health before sending an ambulance to pick up En En to a designated hospital, the reports said.
The CECC said it respects the Control Yuan’s opinions, and would continue to reflect on and improve its policies.
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