Taiwan has surpassed 100 days without recording a new local case of coronavirus, the nation’s Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) announced on Wednesday, Focus Taiwan reported.
Taiwan last recorded a locally transmitted case of coronavirus on April 12. Since then, the island nation has marked 101 days without a new domestic case.
“Even though we have safely passed 100 days without any new local cases, we need to continue to remain vigilant,” Taiwan Health Minister Chen Shih-chung, who heads the CECC, said at a press conference Wednesday.
From July 16-19, Taiwan detected four imported cases of coronavirus “involving individuals returning from the Philippines and Hong Kong,” according to the report.
“Even though there are still sporadic cases of imported COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus], we will continue to employ strict border controls,” Chen said.
“Of the 455 cases recorded in the country since the outbreak began late last year, 364 have been classified as imported, 55 as locally acquired, and 36 as a cluster infection on board a naval ship, an outbreak that was later confirmed to have originated in Taiwan,” the report stated.
As of Wednesday, 440 coronavirus patients in Taiwan have recovered from the disease, seven people have died, and “eight are still receiving treatment in hospital quarantine” the CECC said.
Taiwan has managed to keep its number of Chinese coronavirus cases relatively low due to its early detection of the new virus late last year. The island nation limited travel from nearby China, where the virus originated, early on and was one of the first entities to take serious precautions against the deadly disease.
In April, Taiwan’s government published a letter it sent to officials at the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) in December warning that “atypical pneumonia” had recently emerged in China. Taiwan says this letter proves that the W.H.O. had reason to believe that the Chinese coronavirus was highly contagious as early as December.
The W.H.O. rejected Taiwan’s early warning for weeks and instead tweeted Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda on January 14 claiming there was still “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of the new coronavirus, which internal CCP documents leaked to the Associated Press in April prove was a lie.
Observers view the W.H.O.’s denial of Taiwan’s early warnings about the Chinese coronavirus as evidence of the U.N. health body’s collusion with the CCP to cover up China’s initial outbreak in the city of Wuhan late last year.