Taiwan hands over 20,000 face masks to Argentina

Taiwan has donated 20,000 surgical face masks to Argentina that will be distributed to the nation's medical centers located in areas worst-hit by the  pandemic, Taiwan's representative to Argentina Hsieh Chun-teh  said on Saturday.

Argentina is one of the few Latin American countries to have imposed mandatory isolation quarantine measures for more than five months, Hsieh said, noting that as of Saturday, the number of virus patients had reached 289,100 there, with 5,637 deaths, CNA reports.

Most of the infections were reported from Buenos Aires Province and the city of Buenos Aires, both of which have many slum districts that suffer water shortages and bad hygiene conditions, according to Hsieh.

Despite the mandatory quarantine measures, efforts to contain outbreaks of the disease have not been successful in those areas, Hsieh said, because of the lack of investigation of the pandemic conditions that can help trace infection sources.