China Airlines, has canceled all direct flights to Palau until June 8, the airline said on Friday, citing stricter COVID-19 protocols as the main reason.
Dozens of customers would be affected by the decision, Travel Agent Association chairman Hsiao Bo-jen (蕭博仁) said.
However, Hsiao described the effect as limited, as many customers had already chosen to cancel their trips due to the increasing number of local COVID-19 cases.
China Airlines said that flights to Palau were canceled because it had to comply with a government order issued on Monday that requires flight crew to complete a 14 days of quarantine upon their return to Taiwan.
Previously, they were only required to quarantine for three days, which was raised to five days earlier this month after a cluster infection broke out involving China Airlines pilots, staff at the Novotel Taipei Taoyuan International Airport hotel where they were quarantined and their family members.
The government further tightened requirements following an increase in domestically transmitted cases in the past few days.
China Airlines on Tuesday said that about 10 percent of its cargo services would be affected by the government order.
The Taiwan-Palau “travel bubble” program was launched on April 1, but tourism agencies had reported that sales fell short of expectations.
Concerns about the upsurge in domestically transmitted COVID-19 cases in northern Taiwan have also affected domestic tourism.
Lion Travel Service Co on Friday announced that all group tours scheduled from yesterday to June 8 to Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Keelung and Yilan County were canceled.
Customers could opt for other tour packages, postpone their trips or claim a refund, it said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching