Health authorities are finding it difficult to know how an employee at the Academia Sinica Research Institute in Taiwan contracted the virus last month.
Taiwan’s closure of its borders and its enforcement of strict quarantine rules made local infections very few, and it managed to contain an epidemic wave transmitted to it by airline pilots last spring.
The health authorities confirmed that the laboratory assistant, who was infected with the virus, had previously been bitten twice by mice carrying the infection.
However, these authorities indicated, however, that the investigation is ongoing to determine whether the bites were the cause of the employee’s injury, or if it was possible that there was another source of infection in the laboratory.
“We believe that the probability of infection in the workplace is higher because there are no confirmed infections among the population,” Health Minister Chen Shih-chung told the press. He added, “For the workplace (…) we considered that the risks in the laboratory were greater than those in the office. But whether the infection is from a (rat) bite or from the environment, we must continue our research.”
The affected woman has not traveled recently and received two doses of the Moderna vaccine. The Academia Sinica laboratory is classified as the second highest biosafety level.
And put more than 100 people contacted by the laboratory employee in quarantine.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the island has recorded 14,500 local infections, the last of which was on the fifth of November, while the number of deaths reached 848, most of them within the last wave in the spring.
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