A Taoyuan hospital at the center of a recent domestic outbreak of COVID-19 could reopen as soon as Friday.
The cluster began at Taoyuan General Hospital in mid-January, when a doctor who had been treating COVID-19 patients was infected. In all, health authorities have counted 21 cases linked to the cluster, one of them fatal. The hospital’s patients were all evacuated in late January so that hospital buildings could be disinfected, and the hospital has remained shut since.
However, on Monday, Health Minister Chen Shih-chung said that the outbreak had been “brought to a close”. Around a tenth of the hospital’s staff was on site over the recently-ended Lunar New Year holiday making preparations for the hospital’s reopening. Experts at the Central Epidemic Command Center are now expected to spend Wednesday evaluating whether the hospital can reopen.
Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan says that if the experts give the go ahead, the hospital will hold a reopening ceremony on Friday, which he will attend.