Taiwan donates surgical face masks to Argentina
ROC Central News Agency
08/16/2020 05:14 PM
Buenos Aires, Aug. 15 (CNA) Taiwan has donated 20,000 surgical face masks to Argentina that will be distributed to the nation's medical centers located in areas worst-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan's representative to Argentina Hsieh Chun-teh (謝俊得) said on Saturday.
Argentina is one of the few Latin American countries to have imposed mandatory isolation quarantine measures for more than five months, Hsieh said, noting that as of Saturday, the number of COVID-19 cases had reached 289,100 there, with 5,637 deaths.
Most of the infections were reported from Buenos Aires Province and the city of Buenos Aires, both of which have many slum districts that suffer water shortages and bad hygiene conditions, according to Hsieh.
Despite the mandatory quarantine measures, efforts to contain outbreaks of the disease have not been successful in those areas, Hsieh said, because of the lack of investigation of the pandemic conditions that can help trace infection sources.
Moreover, many Argentinian people wear masks made of cloth, which are not sufficient to provide an adequate level of protection against COVID-19, Hsieh said.
"Materials for pandemic control are insufficient in the slum neighborhoods," he said.
The de facto ambassador presented the surgical masks to the Organización Cáritas Argentina on Aug. 13 on behalf of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Argentina, which represents Taiwan's interests in the Latin American country in the absence of formal diplomatic relations.
The Catholic group will distribute the masks to medical centers that are situated in the most severely affected areas, according to Hsieh.
(By Wang Pi-chih and Elizabeth Hsu)
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