Even in the most remote places, we arrange to have at least one of the telecoms, [laughs] the CHT to arrange at least one of those telecoms will have good 4G network. For people who cannot telework in their profession, of course, there’s a act, a law that says that ...

Yeah, yeah, €30 a day for their stipend, and of course, if they can telework, they of course would telework. We spend a lot of time making sure that those quarantine places in the hotels have good bandwidth so that they can do videoconferencing and so on.

Yeah, it’s the same amount of time, and it’s the same arrangement, except when it comes to isolation. Then, it’s not the medical officers or health officers knocking your door, it will be a police officer knocking your door, but otherwise it’s the same. [laughs]

After the quarantine there’s no shaming possible, we all have gone through it. Because of this, it makes far more sense in a self-interest way to abide the 14-day quarantine. Otherwise, it’s a huge amount of fine and social shaming, too.

The same thing goes on for a quarantine. They abide the quarantining, because we’ve sent them a lot of food, this huge carrying package, a video conference with people who are professional counselors and so on, and a lot of gratitude for their collaboration and so on, elevate social status.

It wouldn’t work. [laughs] We know as a fact it wouldn’t work, so we always design to appeal to their rational self-interest.

If we had say, “You wear a mask to protect the elderly, if you wear a mask to respect each other,” that’s a collectivist argument, and that actually wouldn’t work.

We say, “You wear a mask to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands.” This links hand sanitation and mask use together. This is appealing to one’s own self-interest.

No, I don’t think so. It’s entirely rational self-interest. This is akin to how we build the mask use. We know that wearing a mask alone doesn’t work, you have to wash your hands, too.

If their phone runs out of battery, then a health officer knocks their door I think within minutes.

That’s right.

Yeah. They just say, “Oh, this is my cellphone number.”

No, no, no, no. They would either file a paper form, or they can scan a QR code and file an online form, but it’s not an app.

No, no, no.

It, of course, may do some contact tracing. Because it’s new technology invented after the pandemic, had we rolled it out, then the privacy budget, the privacy implications, the service security implications will be much less trusted because it’s new technology. Everybody understand this physical quarantine idea.

The point here is that the fine is so heavy that people just wouldn’t break the quarantine. That is why quarantining is the first and foremost thing, because quarantine is physical, just like this mask is like a physical vaccine. The boundary is very clear unlike, say, a Bluetooth Bangor ...

If they stay in the quarantine, then we pay them about 30 Euros a day as a stipend for collaboration with the quarantine. If they break the quarantine, then they pay us back up to 1,000 time that, so they can fund 1,000 people [laughs] for a day.

Right. It’s just triangulation.

Also, after the 14-day quarantine, of course, the log is rotated. We cannot keep the data, and the telecoms never hand it to the third party anyway, so the third party cannot sell it to advertisers or something.

Because of that, even if they use a flip phone, a feature phone, that still works. That is the way to use the telecom signals transdata in a way that’s constitutionally protected.

They understand that when we send the SMS to the people in quarantine, and also to the health officers, that SMS has no way to, for example, track their email [laughs] or read their WhatsApp, because it’s not an app.

Because of that, the telecoms do not need to hunt that data to third party processors. They process it entirely within their own data center, and the SMS is sent in a format that very much resembles the advanced earthquake warnings and flood evacuation warnings or a forest fire or ...

Because it’s not GPS, Bluetooth, or WiFi, the resolution is very coarse. Even in the most urban areas, it may be 15-meter radius. Because of that, we don’t know which room you are in, but we do know which district you are in.

The digital fence is that very simple idea that the telecom already know through triangulation roughly where the phone is, because they use it for roaming service. It’s the telecom providers automatically sending SMS if the people go outside of the quarantine zone.

Or if you live in a flat with your own bathroom, then you can do a home quarantine, in which case we very clearly tell you that your phone, or if you don’t have a phone, then we give you a phone for two weeks, will be put into the ...

For example, for the digital quarantine, which is the most important piece, we make sure that when you return to Taiwan, you either go to a quarantine hotel where you’re physically barred from leaving for two weeks.

Because of that, everything we do must be subject to the parliamentary interpelletion. Because of that, we don’t really want to collect new data, because any new data collection would go through this very lengthy process of parliamentary debate, so basically we reuse whatever we have.

Whereas in many jurisdictions they declare a state of emergency, where the administration gets to do pretty much anything, and then the legislation post-approves it in a post hoc fashion, in Taiwan we never do that.

Exactly. Also, another reason is that we never declare a state of emergency. According to our constitution, which is like a German-ish constitution, if the parliament doesn’t approve anything, then we can’t do anything. It’s a pre-approval style of constitution.

We do not collect data that we were not already collecting before the pandemic.

But we don’t collect new data.

Of course, like any science, epidemiology meet amid new evidences, so it’s not like it’s top-down and they’re never wrong. It’s just like when they’re wrong, they admit it very quickly, [laughs] and in a very accountable and competent fashion, and correct it on the very next day’s livestream conference. ...

Basically, what we did is that the central epidemic command center, or the CECC, has the power to interpret the science in a way that all the municipal governments as well as other ministries are subject to the CECC interpretations. There is a very strong like just five people maybe ...

We see that, actually, around the world when people get exposed to SARS 2.0 for the first time – that actually much of the source of not disinformation, but it was not intentional, but rather misinformation, because people get misinformed. That’s a real problem.

It’s a societal inoculation. Because in SARS, the municipal government was saying a very [laughs] different thing from the central government.

Yes.

I think they gave it the second-most column, so that it’s top news. Then entertainment and gossiping, and then fact-checking. It’s very likely that the elderly people will also see the fact-checking before they scroll down. Maybe that’s because we’re not finding enough. If we were finding enough, we would ...

We also make sure that, for example, on “LINE Today,” which is the news feed on the LINE system, the LINE platform gives a prominent section to the fact-checking, the real-time fact-checking.

The elderly also want to help in correcting the disinformation. It’s just that for them, you need to make sure that those lifelong education materials are in their language, and also in a way that is understandable by them. They are a wise bunch of people, and they use LINE ...

The elderly are very active on the LINE platform as well – I would argue even more active [laughs] than the younger people who are much more likely to use Instagram.

Our response, which is always on the social media itself, sometimes even precedes the virality of the disinformation when it comes to the public social media such as Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.

The professional fact-checkers, such as the Taiwan FactCheck Center, MyGoPen – they’re all part of the International Fact-Checking Center, can act on it early, that is to say, when it’s still being end-to-end group-tested, instead of going to the truly viral social media platforms.

That then fuels also the Dr. Message, which is a antivirus company called Trend Micro. It’s a commercial offering called , which is another offering, and so on. These basically get a lot of people into the habit of flagging incoming disinformation as spam.

In a similar way, there’s a lot of people in Taiwan working on technology such as the Cofacts, which is a way for end-to-end encrypted channels such as LINE chat rooms – if you see something and you suspect it as disinformation, you can forward it to the bot in ...

Just like, how do we detect spam? It’s because people flag incoming email as spam and dedicate their fingerprint to the Spamhaus, which is the international organization designed to put a reputation score to the email senders.

Yeah, it’s just a collective intelligence with some assistive intelligence. Much like how do we know there’s SARS cases from Wuhan Seafood Market? Well, it’s because people notice and flag it, and upvote it on the PTT, which is Reddit-like.

If people go to sleep only having seen the outrage part, they forms a ideological association that makes it very difficult to clarify without reinforcing existing stereotypes, so the response time is of essence.

Yeah. It’s the triple-two principle. Whenever there’s a trending rumor, we make sure there’s humor over rumor, meaning that within two hours, we roll out two pictures, each with less than 200 characters, that goes even more viral than the disinformation. The idea, very simply put, is that if you ...

We did this without a lot of division or name-calling or things like that. By May, life has largely returned to normal, and we start planning the triple-stimulus voucher to encourage people to go outdoor more. It’s been more than 200 days with no local cases. Just a very brief ...

On the infodemic front, there’s the cute spokesdog, Shiba Inu named Zongchai, that translates the science into funny meme pictures that of course also help the people to build the mutual support instead of just criticizing people who work in the nightlife or people who return home and so on.