Four new domestic COVID-19 cases connected to a cluster infection involving four schools in Taoyuan were reported in Taiwan on Thursday, bringing the total in the cluster to 30 cases, according to the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC).
New domestic cases
The new cases are a girl who attends Midi Preschool and three relatives of a different student at the preschool who had tested positive on Sunday, Health and Welfare Minister Chen Shih-chung (???), who heads the CECC, said at a press briefing.
The test results of the girl and two of her family members who tested positive on Monday show that their infections were not recent, which means that it is likely that they were the first in the cluster to contract the disease, Chen said.
The CECC has begun testing the girl’s other family members to find out whether this suspicion is true, he said, adding that another possibility is that a different family in the cluster who was the first to test positive was also the first to have been infected.
The cluster of unknown origin in Taoyuan also involves Guanyin Elementary School, Fulin Elementary School, and Shinjie Elementary School. Midi, Guanyin, and Fulin are located in Guanyin District, while Shinjie is in Zhongli District.
Patients in the cluster have been confirmed to have the same version of the Omicron variant that was circulating in an outbreak of the disease in Taoyuan that began in early January, and the CECC is looking into how the two are linked, CECC official Lo Yi-chun (???) said Thursday.
The two other clusters of unknown origin that the CECC is currently monitoring also involve the same version of the Omicron variant, according to Lo.
One of these clusters consists mainly of members of a religious group who dined together at a Taipei restaurant in February. It recorded one new case on Thursday, bringing its total to 49.
The other cluster, which totals eight cases to date, involves a New Taipei family, employees at a hotpot restaurant they dined at before testing positive for COVID-19, and family members of one of the restaurant’s employees.
The CECC is also monitoring three individual cases of unknown origin in Taiwan, of which two are nurses at quarantine hotels in Taipei and New Taipei and the third a marine surveyor who had been working in various harbor areas in central and southern Taiwan before testing positive.
The genome sequence in these three cases does not match that of any other domestic infections confirmed so far in Taiwan.
Imported cases
In addition to the domestic cases, the CECC also reported 66 imported cases on Thursday, 28 of them travelers who tested positive on arrival in Taiwan. The CECC did not release any information regarding the vaccination status of the imported cases.
To date, Taiwan has confirmed 20,653 COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began in early 2020, including 15,446 domestically transmitted infections.
With no deaths reported Thursday, the number of confirmed COVID-19 fatalities in the country remained at 853.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel