Three new domestic COVID-19 cases linked to Kaohsiung restaurant

ROC Central News Agency

03/06/2022 05:08 PM

Taipei, March 6 (CNA) Taiwan on Sunday recorded three new domestic COVID-19 cases, all of which were connected to an employee at a Kaohsiung buffet restaurant, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said.

The employee tested positive on Friday, and her parents and older sister tested positive a day later. Two people from New Taipei and Tainan who had traveled with the employee's parents in the same tour group from Feb. 20 to Feb. 22 also tested positive on Saturday.

On Sunday, two relatives of the Tainan resident tested positive for COVID-19, CECC spokesperson Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥) said.

The other domestic case reported Sunday was an employee at a restaurant in Kaohsiung that serves Taiwanese cuisine, Chuang added.

The parents and sister of the buffet restaurant employee dined at the Taiwanese cuisine restaurant on March 1, Pan Chao-ying (潘炤穎), a senior technical specialist at Kaohsiung's Department of Health, said at a press briefing Sunday.

The 124 other employees at the restaurant have tested negative, as have 325 customers the COVID-19-positive employee had been in contact with, Pan added.

The test results of another 43 customers are still being processed, Pan said.

To date, the cluster involving the restaurant employees and tour group members involves a total of nine cases, and the CECC is still looking into how they contracted the disease.

The CECC is currently monitoring four clusters and two cases of unknown origin in Taiwan.

The three new domestic cases recorded Sunday all received either two or three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.

In addition to the domestic cases, the CECC also reported 40 imported cases on Sunday, 14 of whom were 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 20,840 COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began in early 2020, including 15,462 domestically transmitted infections.

With no deaths reported Sunday, the number of confirmed COVID-19 fatalities in the country remained at 853.

(By Chiang Yi-ching)

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