Taiwan embraces cute mascots for virus prevention campaign
TAIPEI, Taiwan — While China deploys stern communist slogans in its battle against a deadly new coronavirus, democratic Taiwan has embraced cuddly mascots and humour to ease public anxiety and educate on best practices.
Images of cute animals have featured in daily social media updates from government agencies to tackle disinformation and prevent the spread of infections.
The health ministry has deployed a cartoon "
Recent contributions have included advice on hygiene and quarantine regulations
"Leave face masks for the people who need them, frequently wash your hands with soap, reduce touching your eyes, nose and mouth with your hands," read one update.
In a Valentine's Day message,
The post ended with a question: "What if I am single?" to which the pup quipped: "Stay home then!"
The foreign ministry has rolled out a pigeon in a facemask to announce entry restrictions on foreigners with recent travel history to China, adopting the slogan "Virus OUT, Safety IN".
'So quacking exaggerated'
The economic affairs ministry plumped for a goose when it announced that rumours of disposable paper meal boxes running out were "so quacking exaggerated".
The message deployed a homophone where the word for the noise a goose makes sounds similar to the first character for the word "exaggerated" in Mandarin.
The approach contrasts with the Chinese mainland where authorities have tapped their well-oiled propaganda powers to wage a "people's war" against a virus that has killed nearly 1,800 people.
State media has heralded the importance of patriotism to tackle the outbreak in a campaign reminiscent of Mao Zedong's cries to mobilise the masses.
"To visit each other is to kill each other," read one slogan in a quarantined district in Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak. "To get together is to commit suicide."
Despite its cultural links and
The island
There was brief panic buying of face masks before authorities limited each person to just two face masks every seven days using health insurance cards.
The island has also restricted the number of face masks a person can take abroad to 250. Last week, the coast guard stopped a fishing boat for attempting to smuggle out 71,000 masks.
The ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which
President Tsai Ing-wen won a landslide second term in January after an election where she regularly featured as an anime-style cartoon character in campaign literature.
In a similar vein, Premier Su Tseng-chang took to his social media accounts in cartoon form this week to warn against panic-buying toilet paper.
"We only have one butt, don't
Once again, a clever homophone
Follow this page for updates on a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that has struck dozens of people in China.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says on Sunday that he had contracted COVID-19, testing positive at a key point in his flailing campaign for re-election.
Hipkins saYS on his official social media feed that he would need to isolate for up to five days -- less than two weeks before his country's general election.
The leader of the centre-left Labour Party said he started to experience cold symptoms on Saturday and had cancelled most of his weekend engagements. — AFP
The World Health Organization and US health authorities say Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown.
The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries", it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday.
So far, the variant has only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. — AFP
The World Health Organization says on Friday that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, days after designating a new "variant of interest".
The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80% increase compared to the previous 28 days. — AFP
The head of US intelligence says that there was no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with COVID-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report says some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to COVID-19. — AFP
Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Covid lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when he was prime minister, a UK parliament committee ruled on Thursday.
The cross-party Privileges Committee said Johnson, 58, would have been suspended as an MP for 90 days for "repeated contempts (of parliament) and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process".
But he avoided any formal sanction by his peers in the House of Commons by resigning as an MP last week.
In his resignation statement last Friday, Johnson pre-empted publication of the committee's conclusions, claiming a political stitch-up, even though the body has a majority from his own party.
He was unrepentant again on Thursday, accusing the committee of being "anti-democratic... to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination".
Calling it "beneath contempt", he said it was "for the people of this to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman", the veteran opposition Labour MP who chaired the seven-person committee. — AFP
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