Taiwan Gifts Belize $1 Million Dollars in Medical Equipment!
Taiwan is stepping up big time for Belize with another COVID-19 medical equipment donation. In its latest gift, Taiwan donated a million Belize dollars in equipment and materials for hospitals and labs across the country. The donation includes protective gears; nasal swabs; and thermometers. Here’s the story.
Andrea Polanco, Reporting
On Tuesday, Taiwan’s Ambassador to Belize, Remus Li-Kou Chen handed over one million dollars in medical equipment and supplies to Belize. The donation is to help the country with its COVID-19 response. The items, which include two hundred thousand surgical masks, will be distributed to health care facilities and laboratories across the country.
Remus Li-Kuo Chen
Remus Li-Kuo Chen, Taiwanese Ambassador to Belize
“These are very urgently needed medical equipment and materials for our doctors and nurses and those who work frontline in our hospitals, clinics, central lab and so forth. Six infrared thermo imaging cameras and those have already been donated and installed by the borders by the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Immigration as well to take those incoming visitors to see if they have any fever or not. It will be good for hospitals and the border control. And for doctors, especially when they have this kind of risk or get in touch with patient who might have COVID-19 what do they need most? N-95 masks – so we donate today ten thousand of these high quality and very useful masks. They will also be using infrared forehead thermometers which can be used easily, handy at entrance points for any hospitals, public buildings and so there will be five hundred of them and I think they will be distributed by across the country. Next, the two items will be the two thousand pieces of protective clothing, what we call PPEs, together with four thousand isolation gowns. These are mostly important pieces needed by doctors and nurses when they take care of COVID-19 patients. And two automatic nucleic ac or PRC analyzers. I had no idea how much these cost until I was told close to maybe several hundred thousand Belize dollars for each machine. So, these will be added to the work in Central Lab to do a lot more PCR testing. And then we have seven twenty sets for the PCR testing adding to your already strategic resources. And then ten thousand nasal swabs.”
Pablo Marin, Minister of Health, accepted the donations for Belize. Marin says that while these equipment and supplies come at the right time and will go long way for the country’s COVID-19 health response, we must forget that individual actions are critical in the prevention of the spread of the virus.
Pablo Marin
Pablo Marin, Minister of Health
“You know in a pandemic, everybody is fighting for their own products. We found ourselves without swabs; without gowns. Now with PCR coming in, it will help us much more. As we have one PCR machine that can eventually go down and what will happen? Now with two PCR more machines there it will happen. We have asked and we are buying PCRs but they haven’t reached yet because of the demand out there. So, what Taiwan is doing is strengthening Belize and its Belizean people. Any amount of medical equipment that any country has is not enough in a pandemic situation. And the people and the country should realize that we need to maintain every protocol that the Ministry of Health is asking. Wear your mask; social distancing; wash your hands and the proper hygiene that we are always advocating for, with this we can contain the virus. We cannot stop it but we can contain it and we ask everyone out there also because there are jumpers and these are people coming in without telling us. If this continues it can affect us. So we need the help of the community for us to continue to contain the virus which we are doing right now.”
Taiwan’s Far Eastern Memorial Hospital will also donate five used ventilators to the Ministry of Health to be used to treat critical condition patients. Reporting for News Five, I’m Andrea Polanco.
