Europe and large parts of the West are about to open up. First question is: What have you ever had to shut down in Taiwan?

We had to shut down unnecessary international travel from Taiwan to other places. Other than returning citizens, people who are not citizens who visit Taiwan are accepted on a case-by-case basis, so we shut down much of the international flight.

You’re great at keeping shops open, keeping infrastructure open. What would be your most important lessons first for Europe trying to open up now from that point?

First, let’s say that we’re not completely open for business. Let’s make that very clear. Our schools are open, but some businesses that, by design, cannot keep a social distance are not open. That is to say the dancing bars and thing like that, places designed for more intimate encounters, these are not open.

When there is no conceivable way how people can keep a social distance in these business places, then they still remains closed in Taiwan, even though we have many days without any domestic confirmed cases now.

What’s the limit here, just an example?

In Taiwan we closes down the operations that by definition allows for drinking, usually of alcoholic liquor or other drinks, with people who escort you during those drinks. I’m trying to find a neutral term for these kind of places, that’s it.

People usually go there to pay, not for their drinks or the performance, but for an intimate escort who accompany you in those dances or drinks. These are closed.

You have a special approaching saying you’re an open society, one of Asia’s most open societies, also in terms of press freedom. You do daily briefings.

The strategy seems to be to fight COVID with information. Could you name some of those information tools that you’re using?

We talk about fast, fair, and fun. That’s a short video that I shared. I can share with you after the interview.

The fast part is, as you said, a press conference. Equally important is the contact tracing aspect. The contact tracing aspect involves, upon immigration, people who declare their health and symptoms, the various levels of temperature scanning.

Each one is very imprecise, we know, but if you apply it in a layered approach they’re bound to find people with fever, with symptoms. If they show symptoms, then of course they are RT-PCR tested.

The digital fence, the telecoms volunteered to build the home quarantine notification system that sends messages to the local household managers or police if the people breach the home quarantine. These are essential tools to make sure that we make sure the home quarantine actually works without having to physically barricade people.

Now, we are also using the same triangulation telecom data in the aggregate, so that in the Ministry of Transportation and Communications app, you can easily see, where are the most crowded places in Taiwan. You can avoid these places during the upcoming Labor Day holiday, for example. You can choose someplace not as crowded to have your holiday.

I get a color for…

Yes. It’s a heat map.

There’s also this number, 1922, that I was interested in.

Yes. You can just call it. The pick-up rate is consistently around 90 percent now. At lowest, it was 80 percent or so. It’s a really good pick-up rate. You call it and there’s somebody there asking, “What are your suggestions? What are your tips? Did you find some additional ideas that we can use?”

If you are a young boy, you can complain about wearing a pink medical mask gets you bullied at school. In which case, the commander, everybody wears pink medical mask and so on. It’s a general-purpose notification line.

You’re encouraging citizens to call 1922 and to give their suggestions or give observations. It’s not a spying line where you would…

No, it’s not a spying line. No. It’s a participatory governance. You can think of new mechanisms. Even there are people who use traditional rice cookers to reheat the mask and peer-reviewed journal papers that says that this can disinfect the medical mask quite effectively up to three to five times if you don’t enter a hospital or a crowded place.

You’re also seeking to limit disinformation. How do you do that?

With cute dog. Every time there is a CECC press conference, a cute dog, the Spokesdog Zongchai, from the MOHW publishes a cute dog meme that goes viral.

If you look at my latest Tweet, I’m also pushing out a meme that tells people there is a new function in the app, where you can dedicate your uncollected mask in the mask rationing system through the same app to international people in need.

We can crowdsource the number of people who are willing to dedicate their uncollected mask quota to the international friends so that we can send it to other people. As you can see, this picture is a little bit memetic too.

It’s trying to connect the flying medical mask image with a coronavirus plague the world through an airplane. It’s using a Mandarin character too, which is shaped like a flying plane or flying mask.

Also, there are penalties on spreading disinformation. How are they?

If it’s about spreading disinformation on specific epidemic measures, then, of course, they are investigated. We do not punish misinformation if it’s unintentional. The disinformation they find very narrowly intentional untruth that does public harm. If it’s unintentional, it’s not public…

That’s misinformation, right?

Right.

That’s somebody getting something wrong.

That’s right. If it’s an honest mistake, of course, we push out clarification really quickly and we do not sue these people. If it’s designed…For example, there was a disinformation that says, “Click share on this social media post and you can receive one box of masks for free.” That’s a scam. People get not medical masks but computer virus. That’s disinformation.

What do you think has been the impact of the legendary People’s Republic of China 50 Cent Army on spreading disinformation? Can you speak about this?

Sure. During our presidential happening, there was an anti-ELAB protest in Hong Kong. The so-called 50 Cents, I hear that they’ve raised the wage to 80 cents now.

Any case, 50 Cents [laughs] have propagated this account of the Hong Kong anti-ELAB protests being “young rioters” being paid a large sum of money, using even photos from Reuters but with a misleading caption that says there are international CIA or something paying them to murder Hong Kongese police.

It’s spread incidentally not in Hong Kong but in Taiwan. The idea is that it’s trying to paint maybe the most important issue in our presidential election into something that is not in favor of the Taiwan-Hong Kong solidarity.

You mentioned contact tracing. There is a bigger question here first. There’s a big discussion about physical tools, even physical barriers and clothing shops that are too small. On the other side, there’s this idea of social distancing, which is a social tool.

Then, thirdly, there’s the idea that tech could solve it all, because we set up a giant contact tracing system that will help us define who’s sick and sort these people out, probably. Your overall perspective on is there any one most important tool and how big do you think is the role of technology and technological tools in this battle.

The most important social technology is properly washing hands with soap. There is no other technology that is better than soap in this fight.

How important are masks? If you could pick for your country, would you pick masks or a contact tracing app?

I would pick soap and alcohol supply [laughs] for hand sanitation sprays. That is more effective than these two.

Soap and alcohol. That’s great.

Yes. Soap and alcohol spray. The reason is masks is not very useful at protecting oneself, even medical-grade mask if your handwashing habit is bad. They’re only useful as an upgrade measure if you have good hand sanitation habits.

If you look at this tracing app debate in Europe…I know you’re much of an expert being a…

Yeah. We have not deployed any Bluetooth apps like that. I’m interested as a researcher, but we have not deployed anything like that.

Are you looking at this seriously considering it an option to implement one of those app technologies?

There are social-sector volunteer groups, not-for-profit organizations, such as the Taiwan AI Labs that independently have implemented some, for example, the Pan-European Protocol at Bluetooth Tracing or the Singaporean TraceTogether technology. There are independent researchers and developers that have improved or implemented some of those technologies.

Far as I know, none of these have achieved any popular adoption, nor do it plan to have massive adoption in Taiwan. They do contribute to other research groups’ efforts for other places that are considering such tools. We, while are good at coding, we’re happy to help. [laughs] It’s not considered, at the moment, seriously for domestic deployment.

If you look at it from the outside and you hear this discussion about Europe or Germany and Switzerland, which is the leader in the decentralized technology and for apps, do you think this will help us a lot or we should focus on other tools?

First of all, I think, people need to learn about hand sanitation and social distancing, basic epidemiology. You asked me about mask. Mask is a little bit like Bluetooth Contact Tracing app in that it only start becoming useful if a large number of people start using it.

I get it.

It’s not very useful if only a few people use it. In Taiwan, we have an incentive design that I would like to share that makes even just a few people in a crowd wear a mask. They can impact, let’s not say infect, a lot of other people to start also wearing mask. That is a norm design.

It’s an important design that I would like to share. This is because we bill mask as something that reminds you not to touch your mouth with an unwashed hand. It’s a self-reminder. It protects you.

The actual importance of masks is signaling to others and reminding yourself that you should…

…you need to wash your hand before touching your face.

I get it. What are the biggest surprises in Taiwan’s fight against COVID for you personally looking at these things, in particular, looking at the role of technology, I guess?

Two things. First is that I did not expect that a civil society will have so many programmers, designers, coders, and so on dedicating whatever they learned into this mobilization. The mask mapping, for example, where we announce every three minutes, we have pharmacies stock level published. We only expect maybe two or three teams.

We certainly did not expect 130 teams each making a different app, some for people with blindness, some for people with different disabilities, some for people who prefer different languages, and so on. There’s no way that the government technology can simultaneously consider so many different populations’ needs in accessing the pharmacy stock level.

With 130 and more teams working on it concurrently using the same open data, you can have even the most niche demand sustained by one or more of the developer groups. This kind of peer-to-peer coordination is very surprising to me and, to my knowledge, is also very surprising to everybody else who have participated in it.

Just right now, in the g0v Slack channel, which is the main place to coordinate COVID-19-related technologies, there is more than 500 active developers dedicating to COVID-19, and out of 7,000 or so of total members in the g0v Slack channel.

This is a very good ratio of people. People in g0v care about all sort of different things, but a significant number of them, like eight percent, seven percent, dedicate their time to COVID-19.

Could you name probably the most popular or your favorite project here in terms of open technologies?

Yes. The second thing that I want to share is that people who care about the world a lot, people who, for example, our VP, our vice president, Chen Chien-jen published an introduction course epidemiology on the online book platform for free. Everybody can learn epidemiology.

Basically, the officials including our vice-premier, Chen Chi-mai, who studied public health under VP Chen Chien-jen – he was his student – said that, “What we learned in epidemiology in college was classical epidemiology. Today, it’s about digital epidemiology.”

We are all students. None of us are professors here. We’re all learning this together. People said, “Oh, you should add English subtitle so our VP’s course can help people from abroad.”

For the mask dedication, people are saying, “Oh, you should add into an app if I have plenty of mask in supply, I should dedicate the ones that I did not collect in the rationing to the people in need overseas, basically, signaling to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that we have more to give to dedicate to international friends.”

What is my popular idea is instead of just helping Taiwanese people or helping oversea Taiwanese people or their friends, people here are genuinely helping anybody in need instead of just people in Taiwan. This is different. Back in SARS, Taiwan did not have a good, robust, certainly not a daily press conference.

The information pipeline is very confused back then. I still remember that. At that time, we do not have extra time or effort to care for other people that has SARS outside of Taiwan. This time, what’s been most surprising is the popular support of our international outreach.

Thank you for sending the masks. That was great. Do you still have rationing of masks and the technology to show where and when you can buy?

Yes. You can order in one of the three ways. One is you just go to a pharmacy or one of the vending machines in Taipei City and collect immediately. Of course, you have to cue a little bit if there’s many people waiting as well as there’s a limited number of stock, which is why the mask map is important.

Second, far more conveniently, you can go to one of the convenience stores, there’s more than 11,000 or them, and insert your NHI card and still pay. You have to wait a week to collect that, pre-order. There is no cuing for that. It’s all very convenient. When you collect, you can pay again and two weeks afterward, you go there to collect and pay again, and so on.

You can also order through an online app instead of going to the convenience store but still collect at the convenience store. These three pathways all enabled a adult to collect nine per two weeks, or if you are a child under 16, 10 per two weeks.

You’re using an openness approach, publishing information. You have a website as well that’s very transparent on the cases. What do you see data risks here in terms of publishing too much about a particular person? What should Europe refrain from using? What would be your guidelines?

If, for example, when you’re dedicating the masks for international people in need, there’s clearly signaled two options. One says that I want to attach my name to it. The second, you can see here very clearly, there’s two buttons. One says that I want to publish my name. The second says I want to do so anonymously.

Right. Let me screenshot.

OK, sure, of course.

That’s very good. Great. Thank you.

It says you can change your mind. It says that you can change your mind any time in the day but at the end of the day, your last election will be remembered.

The People’s Republic of China, currently in Europe, gets high praise for being able to effectively manage and counter COVID. Do you think Taiwan, with the opposite of the strategy, openness, keeping shops open, publication of the information, was even more successful?

Certainly, I would say it’s even more participatory. It means that the journalists and the people, the citizens if you ask them, “Who is responsible for our victory so far?” they will say, “Oh, it’s us. It’s certainly not the government. The government may be responded to slowly. The government maybe have this problem or that, but we helped the government and we kept Taiwan safe.” That’s…

That’s a good point for Switzerland, particularly, with our bottom-up culture.

Exactly. The end result is not as important to me than how we get there. If we had to lock down everything and do a martial law style lockdown and force everybody to stay home for a month or two, of course, the virus would be gone physically. That will result in a very different culture and a very different society.

What Taiwan’s contribution is that we strengthen democracy during the coronavirus. We have not entered an emergency state.

Our law, constitutionally speaking, is still operating under normal branch circumstances where the legislation need to pre-approve things instead of the emergency legal system where the legislation do a post-confirmation of what the administration is doing. We’re still under normal democracy. That is, I think, our main contribution.

In that regard, using participatory technologies has helped, but not in terms of their particular effectiveness.

Exactly. If people participate enough, there are certainly some good ideas, there will be, like wearing pink medical masks to spread gender mainstreaming, that the government certainly cannot plan that.

The people would say that the government’s policy, “I was a contributor,” just as the medical mask that you received. Soon, starting tomorrow, people will say, “There’s my name on it,” if they choose to disclose their name. If they say anonymous, at least they can say, “Oh, I anonymously contributed to it,” to their friends and families without disclosing their real name to the people.

There is the participatory mechanism design in this regard makes sure that there is a citizens’ republic. That’s what 民國 means — a republic of direct participation by its citizens. That is the cultural norm that we’ve been strengthening during the coronavirus.

Are you worried looking at Europe from abroad having traveled to Europe many times, that we might lose our democratic liberties and that we might even give it up voluntarily because of COVID for longer-term?

If people worry about it, then you will not lose it. If people still think it’s worrying, then it means that the norm has not been changed. It’s not somehow changed into, it’s OK to accept authoritarianism for a bit.

If people insist, for example, there are the Bluetooth contact-tracing app is collaborative developed in an open-source fashion. Then we can say, “Oh, then we can try it out maybe locally in a small area and so on, someplace in Europe voluntarily, maybe starting with the developer themselves to see how it works.”

If it’s done in a top-down way, if the government select one technology without revealing how it was developed, then we have a problem.

Do you think this moment is a chance for Taiwan to demonstrate how your strength in democracy to a larger audience than usually…?

Definitely. I would call it the Taiwan Model, yes.

Two last things that I missed and then I have my 30 minutes up, I guess.

That’s fine.

Taiwan, because of its isolation as an island, how much do those success reflect upon a country that has continental situation? Can we compare that?

Yeah. What is comparable is how the society have mobilized. It may or may not be useful to compare the case history or the number of deaths, or things like that. It really makes sense to compare how much the social norm has changed because of COVID.

In places where people emphasize participation, you see even without very strong trust in the government…Hong Kong is a very good example. The citizens there do not absolutely trust their government measures. There is very little top-down to speak for. The civil society is really good at supporting each other. They know something about masks during the anti-ELAB.

They also, of course, had the same SARS memory as we did. The participatory norm during the coronavirus strengthened the civil society links regardless of whether there was an acceptable or trustworthy government-citizen relationship or not.

The point here I’m making is that it’s comparable to compare one civil society to another civil society in terms of the solidarity, in terms of the innovation, in terms of how impactful have novel ideas such as mask-wearing and so on have impacted each other, how fast do the good ideas spread. You can compare that. It may or may not be useful to compare how fast do coronavirus spread.

What is the most important lesson, with an example at best, to avoid losing democracy in this battle against COVID?

The most important thing is that to make sure that everybody knows the epidemiological reason of each decision and they can decide for themselves.

The public competence in epidemiology, if you start randomly sending out questionnaires and surveys, start asking people, “Do you know what R0 is? Do you know why social distancing is useful? Would you explain how to wash your hands properly? The medical mask, why is it a good substitute for vaccine before we have a vaccine?” and so on.

If you start randomly asking these kind of question to people in a survey, it grows with the time. Then you have a good…

This is what you do in Taiwan.

Yeah. We do that.

How do you do it? How…?

With an online course. The VP, the vice president himself promoted a video with such a questionnaire in order to enlist people to attend his online epidemiology course. Some of the most popular YouTubers take those quiz. I think only one got all of them correct.

In any case, it was a very popular promotional activity. It’s popular to learn epidemiology. You can see people enrolling into those classes and sharing those epidemiological tips and ideas and also fact checks, like it’s not useful to, for example, eat garlic or something to counter coronavirus.

The point here is that if you have an authoritarian, counter-democratic, top-down measure without explaining why each measure is taken, then people still keep themselves ignorant about how epidemiology works, and may spread conspiracy theories because of the non-transparency of the decision-making process.

If you do the same quiz as we do to our YouTubers, you may see people believing in even more and more pseudoscientific ideas.

Are you not scared of a second wave to come? Do you fear that? Is there any special measures, looking ahead towards this event, that you’ve newly installed?

Yeah. At the moment, the important thing is whether and how do we resume business travel. At the moment, it’s just returning citizens. We’re pretty good at that already, home quarantine and things like that.

If we restart business travel, especially between fellow islands…I read from the news that, for example, New Zealand is considering if they decelerate and with a rapid testing available, maybe it’s conceivable to think about a Taiwan-New Zealand flight because we’re similarly safe.

That reminds of, is there any country that you are looking at? You’re always hailed as the world’s leading country or most ahead on the epidemiological curve probably, is there any country, Iceland, for example, had zero new cases, Greenland, as well?

We are all in touch with these people. As I said, it’s not just sharing what we have learned. Our command center responses and so on, our rules on social distancing and so on are all collaborative efforts with other leading epidemiologists across the world. There are many Taiwanese epidemiologists teaching in universities outside of Taiwan.

It’s an international think tank that collectively work on this. Not all the experts that are involved in the Taiwan counter corona effort lives in Taiwan. They may be still Taiwanese. Maybe they know they have a good relationship with Taiwan. They are also leading their own response in whichever country they are. They also participate in the decision making in the expert panel.

That’s fascinating. Are you about to build an island community, particularly, an island community in the battle of COVID, an international island?

[laughs] I attended a virtual island summit but that was on countering climate change, which is a longer term issue. It’s not a short term issue. [laughs] Something like that is happening. In Taiwan, the g0v initiative when they built the mask map, they immediately get reported in Japan for the COVID Japan people and also in South Korea.

The first system that goes online on South Korea for mask map stock level is written by 江明宗 (kiang) in Taiwan. We export our civic technology to South Korea, which may or may not be an island, depending on how you look at it but, certainly, in a similar situation. When they decided to ration their masks through pharmacies, they can use the Taiwan source code directly.

When Tokyo built its dashboard, I participated by translating, helping to correct one typo in the translation, the mayor of Tokyo Tweeted to thank me for it. It’s a lot of people in g0v helped translating. Not only now the Tokyo dashboard has a Mandarin Taiwan version, but also Taiwan can visualize our own cases using the Japanese code base.

It’s all made in the world in a sense. People are sharing those technologies. We have launched the cohack.tw event which was just launched. If you click it, you can see that it’s a part of the joint US-Taiwan contribution. We’re looking at six different categories. People can crowdsource, meaning that they can share their ideas of what is the most important thing to solve in one of the six groups.

You can see a lot of contributions from people in French, from people in the US, from people from across the world. We will soon announce what is the top thing to solve in each of the six category and focus our development energy on it. Even though they may not be useful in Taiwan, we are still very committed to developing it.

Last question touching on the WHO situation. Taiwan realized the emergence of the virus on December 31st. You’ve tried to reach out to the WHO.

It was an email saying that we’ve learned. It’s on PTT, which is Taiwan’s equivalent of Reddit. There was a repost of Dr. Li Wenliang’s social media post. It’s the same information as what’s already circulating in the PRC social media except, of course, for a while, the people in Wuhan did not learn about it. It was harmonized.

Dr. Li Wenliang gets a punishment from the local institutional police for spreading rumor, basically. Technically, it’s not SARS. It’s a new SARS, so it’s a rumor or something like that. They have a way to explain this. It already got attention in Taiwan. In a sense, that could be…

WHO didn’t listen to your warning.

Dr. Li Wenliang saved Taiwan. The scientific community did learn about the new coronavirus. It’s more like the ministers and the journalism community did not learn of this in time.

If we had listened to that warning you were trying to give to the international political and media community, could we have avoided…? What would have been the effect?

If Taiwan is a full member of the WHO, that would mean that we have full ministerial access and not just scientific community or occasionally academic community access. The difference is very clear. Unless your vice president happened to be the person who write the textbook on epidemiology, having the academic access doesn’t always translate into government action.

Ministerial access always translates to direct government action. Our scientists can sometimes talk to fellow scientists. Unless the scientist on the other side happens to be a vice president, it’s not the same as a ministerial access.

Honorable Minister, I’m trying to make you give me a great quote what we have lost here in Europe and internationally by excluding the valuable information that you were trying to share. That’s what I’m trying to push you.

What would be the best sentence if I ask you, what would have happened if we had listened or if the WHO would be open? Your answer could be, “You could have avoided hundreds of thousands of people dying.”

I will say something factual. Last December, the last day of December, we took a note. We contacted the WHO about the emergence of the new viral disease. Then, immediately, we decided for the next day to start health inspection for flight passengers from Wuhan to Taiwan.

Until January 10th, WHO at that time still does not recommend health inspection for flight passengers from Wuhan China. What this means is that if our measures, which was start health inspections for flight passengers from Wuhan, starts implemented at ministerial level at all the different countries, everybody can start responding at least 10 days earlier.

The world has lost 10 days in the battle against COVID, because we didn’t listen to your early advanced warning?

I would say that if other countries as we did, were to begin health inspections for flight passengers from Wuhan either through Taiwan’s participation in WHO or other international organizations, then everybody’s response would be 10 days earlier.

That’s amazing. That would have changed the course of history, I guess. You don’t think so?

In science, we cannot go back in time. I would simply say that, personally, I feel sad that it was not heeded at the time. I do not know in a country-by-country basis how much would 10 days of foresight change things. That I cannot say. I would say that I, personally, feel sad that we did not have that opportunity at the time.

Are you seeing signs that the Europeans or the Westerners are more open to more collaboration with Taiwan now as a result of your experience?

Yes. We have many bilateral conversations with different epicenters, which is a better term to use than different countries. One country may have multiple epicenter. Every epicenter is very different. We do support them by sharing our experience, sharing our medical research, and providing medical resource to all the epicenters around the world.

It’s important for us that you spoke to us because there’s a tendency to hype and promote authoritarian reactions towards COVID. It seems to me that you’re not convinced that the authoritarian response is better.

It’s an amplifier. If you are already authoritarian, it amplifies the authoritarianism. If you are already a participatory democracy, this can amplify the participatory democracy. That’s a quote. If you go through the timeline on Taiwan Can Help which is a link I just pasted you, you can find more in that timeline.

Thank you so much, Minister. That was great. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. I will embargo the transcript until you publish. That was our…

We’ll let you know once it’s published. It might take seven days because we’re a print magazine so there are some days…

That’s just fine. I’ll send you the transcript anyway. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Minister, what is more effective in battling Coivid19, democracy or authoritarianism?

Collaborative governance — COGOV — is the most effective way to counter the COVID.

Great! So your strategy against Cod19 was to bring more people on the Join platform and channels.

COGOV refers to “Decentralized co-governance architecture” here, which includes government platforms but primarily are based on social sector platforms.

That is to say https://join.g0v.tw is even more important than https://join.gov.tw here :-)

As a proponent of decentralization, do you also support the decentralized protocol for contact tracing app, DP3T?

As a technologist I’ve studied it with great interest but cannot comment on specific implementations, especially because Taiwan has currently no pressing need to deploy it.