As the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) announced Level 3 COVID-19 Alert nationwide, Mayor Huang Wei-che has announced THREE measures in Tainan City, including large-scale city-wide disinfection, mask-wearing enforcement, and enhanced disease control at medical institutions. Tainan also conducts THREE following activations, including full implementation of real name registration, city-wide testing and screening for high-risk groups, and medical comprehensive emergency response.
The FIRST measure is “large-scale city-wide disinfection”. Tainan starts from sanitizing and disinfecting all the major traffic nodes, such as highway bus terminals and train stations (Taiwan High Speed Railway and Taiwan Railway). The government also conducts daily sanitation and disinfection at public wet markets, public parks and its restrooms, where citizens frequently visit. 860 claw machine shops in Tainan should shut down starting from today. All the food or beverage stands/stores must implement real name registration, divider installing, and arranging checkerboard seating measures.
Some citizens report that someone did not follow the mask-wearing rule. Now launched the SECOND measure as “mask-wearing enforcement”, bringing together the Policy Bureau, the Public Health Bureau, and the volunteer teams in police and firefighting to strengthen exhorting and scanning. For people who still insist on not wearing masks after the public authority’s advices, will face penalty, and may be adopted multiple times.
The THIRD measure is “enhanced disease control at medical institutions”. All city hospitals want to bring hospital cases down to zero and cut down any possibility of inner hospital infection. To enhance epidemic prevention and control capacity, Tainan is also working with the central command center to increase designated wards setting and centralize quarantine stations establishing.
Mayor Huang Wei-che expressed his gratefulness to Minister-without-portfolio Audrey Tang for putting out the “QR Code System for Real Name Registration”. Tainan is ready to use this system well, starting from all public government offices and implementing it on city buses and highway bus terminals, setting up QR code scanning system. This QR code system using will be expanded to all shopping districts and stores.
The second activation is to launch “city-wide testing and screening for high-risk groups”. All district public health centers in the city have set up testing and screening booths (please see the attached table). Mayor Huang emphasizes that these outdoor testing stations are not for all normal citizens, but specifically for high-risk targets whom the public officials actively approached and informed. These individuals are asked to come to get tested either because they are listed as contacts of confirmed cases or they ever visited the place where confirmed cases visited but not being accurately listed. The goal is to the find out more potentially infected individuals and cut down infection to contain the outbreak.
Mayor Huang stresses the most important thing is to activate “medical comprehensive emergency response”. All hospitals in Tainan should eliminate unnecessary surgery operations, ease the testing load of emergency rooms, preserve medical capacity, and avoid crowding out of resources that are meant for acute illness patients that require intensive care.