Taiwan’s Presidential Office held its 2021 New Year’s flag-raising ceremony on Friday morning. Most years, people are allowed to attend the flag-raising ceremony. However, organizers closed this year’s event to all but an invited few as a pandemic precaution. Instead, organizers streamed the ceremony online.
The government has stopped processing foreign students’ applications to enter the country. That’s as Taiwan prepares to close its borders to most foreign nationals for a month-long period starting Friday due to the spread of a new strain of COVID-19.
Given the continued severity of COVID-19 worldwide and in order to secure domestic antipandemic efforts and ensure public health, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) announces that beginning January 1, 2021, at 00:00 (local time at the airport of departure), entry restrictions and quarantine regulations for foreign nationals will be tightened.
President Tsai Ing-wen delivered her 2021 New Year's Address on the morning of January 1 in the Entrance Hall of the Presidential Office Building.
The amount of rice eaten by Taiwanese has again hit a new low. It has fallen by nearly half from the level of 80-90 kilograms per person per year back in the 1960s and 1970s, and will soon be outstripped by the rising consumption of wheat.
On December 31, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) announced two new confirmed imported cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Taiwan. The two new cases arrived in Taiwan from the United Kingdom (Case #799) and India (Case #800).
