Audrey Tang: Very nice meeting you.

Gabriella Colarusso: Thank you so much for your time. I know you are really busy in this period. For the people who are listening to us, I am Gabriella Colarusso. I am editor at “La Republica,” which is one of the two main newspaper, daily, in Italy.

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Gabriella Colarusso: As maybe you know in Italy, we are at almost two months in total lock down for this pandemic. For us, for our readers, it’s really important and interesting to know what’s happening in Taiwan. I’m starting to ask you, how is the situation now on the ground? You can describe us.

Audrey Tang: Yes, our professional baseball league has been playing for a while, the only baseball league to be playing in the world. This week, we are starting to reopen the entrance of the audience into the baseball league. Meaning that all the domestic cases that we discover have been contact traced and pretty well under control.

Audrey Tang: It’s been a very interesting kind of days, but for domestic days, there’s been half a month or more with no domestic cases now. We are seriously considering to look into our guidelines that make baseball outdoor-playing audience difficult and so on, and relax the constraints on the public gathering. We did not have a lock down in the first place.

Audrey Tang: Our schools and business open as usual, but we do have some restrictions on large gatherings. We are now considering to relax those a little bit.

Gabriella Colarusso: Looking at the numbers, you have at the 24 of April 428 cases and 6 deaths, right?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Today, we have 437, but recently, it’s always been returning citizens. Domestically, it’s been quite a while with no cases.

Gabriella Colarusso: Taiwan has won the global praise for its response to COVID. I am interested in the roots, the regional piece. I think from what I read that most comes back to 2003 with the SARS outbreak. Can you explain us shortly in which way that experience influence the Taiwan steps also in this case and the response of Taiwan in an epidemic?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Ever since the 2003 SARS epidemic, we have been reviewing the things that we did not do well. For example, back in 2003, there were no central epidemic command center. There was very confusing, like what does the local municipality versus the national government do? The chain of command was very much chaotic back in the SARS days.

Audrey Tang: I think everybody in Taiwan who are above 30 years old remember how chaotic it was. We decided that 37 people died for that is 37 people too many. It was a particularly traumatic episode where we had to basically barricade an entire hospital without any warning and without explaining the extent of time of which they would be barricaded, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I would say it’s like a societal inoculation that last year, last December, the last day of the December, when the whistleblower, Li Wenliang, shared on social media, which is immediately re-posted in Taiwan, everybody in the CDC is like, “Oh, SARS has happened again, and we have to implement all the defense strategies as if SARS has happened again.”

Gabriella Colarusso: That was interesting, the night of 31 December, because it’s not easy, or it’s not immediate to understand the relationship between freedom of expression and pandemic. Can you tell us what happened that night with the medical officer of the CDC and the message on PTT?

Audrey Tang: Yes. It was very early that day, like 2:00 AM or something. In PTT, which is a not-for-profit forum that has been supporting a lot of Taiwan’s civil society movements, because it’s not-for-profit, there is no advertisements or things like that. Everybody can post freely on PTT without worrying that they will be censored or things like that. It’s equivalent of Reddit. It has good parts.

Audrey Tang: It has not-so-good parts, but it’s very free, is what I am saying. What the nickname, NoMoreType, was the nickname of the person who posted. We only know them by this pseudonym back then. That what they shared is a social media post in the PRC from the Dr. Li Wenliang, as well as the pictures to support the arguments of Dr. Li Wenliang’s whistleblowing.

Audrey Tang: About this same hour was the hour that Dr. Li Wenliang would get questioned by his institution. After a few days, Dr. Li Wenliang would get punished by his local police for whistleblowing. At the same time, very early morning that day, the CDC’s medical officer was also looking at the PTT.

Audrey Tang: They look at this sharing, and because they are professional, they see that the tests are actually real, scientific tests. It’s posted by somebody who know what they are doing. It is not some fabricated material. It looks like something like SARS has actually really happened again.

Audrey Tang: Instead of punishing the civil society, because Taiwan is actually the most free society in whole of Asia when it comes to freedom of expression, the CDC immediately went to investigate the veracity of such a whistleblowing. They decided that it is believable, and it is also to be treated seriously as if SARS happened again.

Audrey Tang: The very next day, that is to say, the first day of 2020, we started implementing the measures that we agreed upon back in 2003. We started health inspections for flight passengers from Wuhan the very next day.

Gabriella Colarusso: The CDC also wrote an email to WHO.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, asking for clarifications, like, “We see this SARS happened again,” yes.

Gabriella Colarusso: What was their response? Do you think that the WHO did well its job in this pandemic?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Well, we know that WHO, at January the 10th, still did recommend health inspection for passengers from Wuhan. At that day, we’ve already did the health inspection for 10 days.

Audrey Tang: If we had direct ministerial access to members of WHO, then each country can decide for their own, based on what Taiwan has contributed in those 10 days, the evidence that we gathered, and the evidence that we’re about to gather. In December 12th, we sent two experts to Wuhan to get more information about the outbreak and control. As it were, we had no ministerial access.

Audrey Tang: We only have limited access to the academic community. Unless our vice president, who literally wrote the textbook on epidemiology, but also is our vice president…Unless they have an academician who is also a high-level politician, they will miss the early warning that Taiwan shared to the scientific community.

Audrey Tang: That is a little bit sad, because if they had heeded the warning 10 days earlier, then everybody have 10 more days to make response.

Gabriella Colarusso: Going back to the measures that Taiwan implemented to fight the pandemic, one of the key strategies in the world have been contact tracing. Explain us, how does it work in Taiwan? All the world is talking about this app for contact tracing, and this issue is very debated a lot also in Italy.

Gabriella Colarusso: The government is going to implement this application for contact tracing, but you do something different, right?

Audrey Tang: Right. We have not launched any contact tracing apps. There is no app in Taiwan for contact tracing. What we have done instead is that, from the very beginning, we took an idea that we use the digital fence, that is to say, the mobile phones that everybody carries as a way for people who are under home quarantine, because they return from a place with COVID.

Audrey Tang: If it’s a very serious place, or if they live in a place with little room for them to be isolated within their own home, then of course, they are sent to this quarantine hotel. If they do live with a spacious enough place by them own or with no vulnerable people, and they can keep to themselves, then we use a home quarantine. For the home quarantine, still, they are limited in where they can go.

Audrey Tang: Basically, the phone is registered to the five telecoms who voluntarily send an SMS if their phone went out of battery, or take too long without movement, or if they go out of the triangulated position of the digital fence. In which case, they send an SMS to the local household managers or local police, who will then go and check whether the person have broken home quarantine.

Audrey Tang: If they keep on this quarantine for 14 days, they receive about €30 a day to reward for their time. If they break the quarantine, they are fined 1,000 times that.

Gabriella Colarusso: This is basically for people who have been tested and they resulted positive to COVID?

Audrey Tang: No. If they are positive, they actually get treated in the hospital. This is for people who travel from high-risk or mid-risk places back to Taiwan, before they can go to the society and mingle with people. There is a period where people can show no symptom, but they could still be contagious. They need to stay at home for 14 days to watch if any symptom have developed.

Gabriella Colarusso: While people who are positive, they are treated just in the hospital not at their houses?

Audrey Tang: Exactly, yes.

Gabriella Colarusso: If there is a person who has no way to respect social distance at their place, how can they do quarantine?

Audrey Tang: If they don’t have a living quarter that they can isolate themselves, then of course, we direct them to a quarantine hotel, which they can stay in a dedicated place. That’s not a big problem. A larger problem is if they cannot keep a social distance in normal business.

Audrey Tang: For example, in Taiwan, there are certain pubs that people go there, not primarily for the drink, but rather for the intimate escorting of people who have drinks with them. Let’s put it in a very neutral manner.

Audrey Tang: Then these places, these escorted drink places and escorted dancing places, they are one of the few businesses that are ordered to close during the COVID outbreak, because there is no feasible way for those businesses to keep a social distance while operating. If you are just singing karaoke, you can wear a medical mask and keep and a meter and a half apart, that is fine. Karaoke still operate.

Gabriella Colarusso: Going back to digital fence, who are the people authorized to process and also to keep these data from…?

Audrey Tang: The data is not collected in an extra manner. There is no extra data collected. Each telecom already collect the signal strength data, anyway. Each participating telecom already have the whereabouts to about 50 meters resolution of where each phone is. The only difference is that they agreed to implement the automated SMS system on top of the data that they already collect.

Audrey Tang: I will not say that this is collecting extra data, like the apps. The apps would be collecting extra data that was previously not collected. With cellphone tower triangulation, there is no extra data collected. There is only an algorithm, a code, that one of the telecom develop, the CHT telecom. That telecom publishes this algorithm to the other telecoms.

Audrey Tang: They agree to run the same code so that no matter which telecom provider you are using, if you break out of the digital fence, the SMS is sent, anyway.

Gabriella Colarusso: After the 14 days, the system stops?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. There is no constitutional basis.

Gabriella Colarusso: The department can’t contact me again.

Audrey Tang: Not at all, exactly. Back in SARS, we had to barricade the entire hospital. The Constitutional Court ruled that that’s not unconstitutional, but we need to find a better alternative. To barricade people without warning, without a due process, and without a pre-agreed extent of time is very traumatic.

Audrey Tang: The Constitutional Court says that we need to find alternatives that has more due process, that has a more fixed length of time, that has a more clearly-indicated, informed process, and so on. The digital fence is strictly better than physically barricading people, I think everybody agrees on that.

Audrey Tang: People know that, after the 14 days, they will no longer have to fear that they are still being tracked this way. Within the 14 days, it is true that it is a violation on their social movement and privacy, but that is a very fixed length of time.

Gabriella Colarusso: This is interesting that you didn’t raise the context of the 400 and more cases you detected in Taiwan. Is there some way that people, for example, can know if they went to a place where a COVID-positive went?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we do do interviews with the people who are confirmed positive to find their contact history. In that regard, it is just standard epidemiology. It’s no different from any other team is doing. If we see the contact by the interview, then of course, we also quarantine them and test them. That is a standard approach. Publishing of case travel history is not the norm in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: If our interview already revealed the people who have been in contact with them, we do not publish it, because there is no need to publish that. It’s only in the rare cases where we do not know which overlapping pathways did we anticipate. For example, there was a cruise ship called the Diamond Princess.

Audrey Tang: Because the tourists went all over the place, it is impossible to know how many people they have contacted just by interviews. By that, we did send a broadcast message to everybody in the municipalities of the tourism places and tell them, “Here is a map of where they went to. You can check whether your travel history overlaps with that.”

Audrey Tang: It is not by you uploading your data to the government. It’s not like that. There is a tool developed by the civil society called Pandemic.Events that download your location history from Google, for example, and compare it on your phone with the Diamond Princess travel history. The result is kept strictly on your phone and not shared to anybody else.

Audrey Tang: It’s a privacy-preserving tool to match the proximity. The publishing of such material is not the norm. This is only what we do if we cannot discover the contact history through interviews.

Gabriella Colarusso: As a citizen, if I understand correct, as a citizen in Taiwan, I can know if there’s some quarantined people in my neighbor, for example, or not?

Audrey Tang: Of course, you can get the aggregate statistics of how many people are in quarantine in your county or your vicinity, or whether there is quarantine hotels in your vicinity. That is not hidden information. You cannot learn anybody about the name, the whereabouts, or the personal information of the people in quarantine.

Audrey Tang: The place doing the quarantining as well as the county-level distribution of confirmed cases, that is public information. We do not, as a norm, publish down to individual level.

Gabriella Colarusso: You used digital tools also to make better distribution of masks in Taiwan. Can you tell us about the masks?

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of surgical masks that’s needed by the medical workers. Even for normal people, we know that medical masks work slightly better than clothes masks. Especially, you can wear it for a longer period of time without feeling discomfort. Whereas clothes-based masks is an OK alternative, still people prefer to wear medical mask.

Audrey Tang: It’s a culture that’s already established since the SARS epidemic, so it has a long history. There is a lot of demand of medical mask in the very beginning. Because we produce only less than two million mask a day at that time, there is no way that everybody can easily get their desired number of mask. It leads to panic buying, hoarding, and everything.

Audrey Tang: After only a few days of panic buying, we decided that we will start rationing out our production facilities so that everybody can get some number of mask every week. As of today, everybody who is an adult can get nine medical mask every two weeks.

Gabriella Colarusso: Nine?

Audrey Tang: Nine every two weeks. If you are a child, 10 every two weeks. It is not exactly one medical mask a day. You still have to reuse it somewhat. I have helped to film short video to use a rice cooker to disinfect the mask, so that you can double the time or triple the time that you can use those medical mask. That helps, but how do we know that people are getting what their quota is?

Audrey Tang: We work with the pharmacies. Each pharmacy who have this card reader of the National Health Insurance card know that you can swipe your NHI card and get your ration, purchasing your ration. Then that leads to another issue, how do we know that there are pharmacists near me that still have masks? That lead to the map, which is contributed by the civil society.

Audrey Tang: There’s more than 130 variations of the map. It’s not necessarily a map, actually. For people with blindness, they prefer a table, a voice assistant, a chat bot, or things like that. There’s many, many different applications in the mask website.

Audrey Tang: What we have developed instead of a particular application – we didn’t do any application – is to publish the stock level of each pharmacy’s mask stock. Instead of publishing at the end of the day, or end of the month, which is what most other countries will do, we publish every three minutes.

Audrey Tang: Everybody can go to a pharmacy, get nine mask. After a minute or so, they can refresh their phone and see the stock level actually deplete by nine. This is participatory accountability. People make sure that this system works fairly, because everybody can see at a glance that there is still plenty of masks around. They don’t have to stand in line. Also, they can confirm that this system is not rigged.

Audrey Tang: This system is working as it intended. Based on that, then we also enlisted the help of convenience stores for pre-ordering the masks. or you can even go to an online website called eMask to pre-order your mask to deliver to the convenience store. At the moment, there is more than 6,000 pharmacies and more than 12,000 convenience stores joining in this mask distribution.

Gabriella Colarusso: Do you know how many masks are produced in Taiwan daily now?

Audrey Tang: Yes. At the moment, we are around, so 17 million per day.

Gabriella Colarusso: Wow. There were some requisition of companies, factories to do it, or not?

Audrey Tang: The rationing is based on the idea that this is a critical supply. The entire mask economy – that is to say, medical mask – is nationalized. Exactly as you said, it requisitioned. We do not requisite, as I mentioned, the non-medical grade mask, like the cloth mask or mask designed to protect people against the spores or things like that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We only nationalized the production of masks that are medical grade and can filter out virus and bacteria.

Gabriella Colarusso: Audrey, there is another way you are using social innovation and digital technology in this pandemic, it is for combating disinformation.

Audrey Tang: Yes, we make sure that, it’s called humor over rumor. We make sure that anything that is a rumor meets its counterpart from the clarification partners and from the ministries within two hours. Usually, the ministry can respond within one hour now. It’s always very much funny, so that people see the fun message and share it before they see the disinformation.

Audrey Tang: It’s so successful now, with the spokes-dog of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, that everybody learns to wait for the spokes-dog to post the memes after the Center of Epidemic Command Center releases their press conference material for the daily press conference.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost like a rhythm, where people, even if they have some doubts or some questions, waits for the 2:00 PM daily press conference. After that, they wait for the spokes-dog to push out very comical, funny messages.

Gabriella Colarusso: Now, a more political question, and it’s breaking news. US State Security Mike Pompeo is accusing China of being covering up the news, especially from the first weeks of the pandemic. United States are asking for an international investigation.

Gabriella Colarusso: What is the Taiwan government’s position on this part? Also, I would like to know if you notice some Chinese propaganda also online to build the narrative about this pandemic.

Audrey Tang: There’s a few things. First of all, as a participant in the Wikimedia community, the idea that people put announcements online gets backed up by the Wikipedia community. That is what I firmly believe in. I believe in radical transparency and also accountability. There is a document, the document around the health notice of the pandemic that is gone.

Audrey Tang: I will just paste you the link, and you can decide for yourself whether that qualifies or not as a material in your work. If you translate through machine translation this, this clearly shows that, as of January the 11th, the Wuhan City is still telling the world that they have not discovered any knew cases in the past week or so.

Audrey Tang: That there is no clear evidence that this is being a human-to-human transmission, and things like that. It is a real document that they published over the web at that time. This is also the document upon which that they penalized Dr. Li Wenliang for incorrectly whistleblowing, because that contracts with what they say on this document.

Audrey Tang: Strictly speaking, it’s not SARS happened again. It’s SARS, variation two, and COV2. They have some way to say that Dr. Li Wenliang isn’t entirely accurate in saying that SARS have repeated itself. Again, they have a way of saying that. If you click the link at the end of                                                       the Wikisource page that links to wjw.wuhan.gov.cn                                                  , you will find that is 404 — the link is gone.

Audrey Tang: They have taken down the notice in January 11th, even though that the Wikipedia community have backed it up, and we have evidence of screenshots, and things like that. They did this without a very clear explanation. I think it is important that people understand that, at that time, in January 11th, there was such a document.

Audrey Tang: This document is used both domestically, to hamper the whistleblower as well as the journalistic freedom, and also, externally, so that the WHO at that day still did not recommend health inspection from people flying out from Wuhan to their member countries. The fact that they took this document down, I think, warrants international discussion.

Gabriella Colarusso: What you are telling me is that, basically, we already have evidence that China didn’t communicate the rights things, and we don’t need an international investigation for this?

Audrey Tang: What I am trying to say is that, if they take down a notice that they did post by the Wuhan City in January 11th, there would need to be an accountable reason why that they took this down.

Audrey Tang: Without an accountable reason, it is, I think, normal for journalists all over the world to investigate this deeper, to say basically, “What would have happened if this is not posted, and that Dr. Li Wenliang or other whistleblowers is allowed to warn more people?”

Gabriella Colarusso: Audrey, for me, it’s OK. It was really interesting. I will send you the link when it will publish, I think tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

Audrey Tang: After that, we will publish our conversation as a transcript to your website, like the transcript I’ll send you.

Gabriella Colarusso: Perfect, and I hope to meet you soon in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: OK, thank you. Have a good local time. Bye.

Gabriella Colarusso: Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.