 I can see you and I can hear you. Okay. Okay. So looking from far away Taiwan, Europe, Germany in particular in Corona hotspot. What's your impression about that? Well, I think you've currently experiencing a hotspot as you mentioned, but you are not growing exponentially, meaning that there is a pretty good system in place that is keeping this linear that is to say sub exponential. So of course, we think that after half a year now with no local transmitted cases, we can help by focusing our energy on the mask on the vaccination on the all the pandemic countering efforts together and from the vantage point of a island that has already post coronavirus life for half a year now. Okay. And here we still have a mention before we still have demonstrations, people here against face mask and governmental restrictions from your point of view, how important is communication and transparency on the government? You see a lack of this in European countries in Germany. How do you do that in Taiwan? First of all, I think the masks, if you're billing it as a fashion item, rather than particular top down restriction measures that tend to travel better for very early on in the pandemic, we made sure that people understood we wear a mask to protect ourselves from our own hands, from our own unwashed hands. That was the message that's worth spreading. For if you build a mask as something that protects the others or protect the elderly, respect the community, and so on, then of course, there are individuals that feel less importance to these characteristics. But if you say wear a mask to protect yourself against your own unwashed hands, suddenly it links hand sanitation mask use together and its entirely rational self interest. I think that's a very important thing to focus on the communication based on rational self interest. What are you doing better than Germany? How did you manage that there are hardly any infections in Taiwan? Well, we had a societal inoculation. Back in 2003, when SARS 1.0 hit Taiwan, we had to barricade an entire hospital unannounced. The local municipality and the central government were saying completely different things. It was very chaotic and so on. So the whole society learned from that experience, including mask use. And so when SARS 2.0 raises has again around December last year, when Dr. Lee went out and blew the whistle on our social media, we immediately switched to the counter SARS mode that we all learned for everyone above 30 years old. We all learned how to counter SARS using face mask and hand sanitation. Do you think that Germany missed looking at this early pandemics in the 2003, I think, because there were no emergency plans at all when SARS started and Corona started in a sense. In a sense, yes, you are experiencing your own SARS 1.0 because for you, that's the first SARS that erased in the consciousness of the population. And of course, the vaccine will arrive and SARS 1.0 for you will resign. But on the other hand, there will be SARS 3.0. The SARS may become something like the flu and go through yearly mutations. So no matter what, hand sanitation and mask use are still essential because this virus may mutate. Somewhere in an article I read the term participatory self-surveillance. Activists, developers and citizens have been collaborating with the government, a sort of online democracy. Has that kind of model been a main key to fight the virus all together as a whole society? Definitely. We take an all of society approach. So for example, the community you mentioned, the G0V or GovZero community with hacktivists such as Fijian Qiang and Howard Wu developed a map visualization for the pharmacists to display to their customers queuing in line. Anyone can check on their smartphone how many masks are there available in that particular line. And people can check that people queuing before them are actually swiping their national health card and actually the mask distribution is working in a fair fashion. And if they detect any discrepancy, they would just call the hotline 1922 to report so that on the daily life briefing of the Central Epidemic Command Center, everybody can learn the newest developments and measures and innovations from the civil society. Just give me one second. The battery is empty, of course. No, it's fine. Battery technology is one of the things that's not exponential. Yeah, so I just have to change it. I have to cut it off. So can you just tell me how is the daily life nowadays in Taiwan concerning Corona? How is it? Yeah, as I mentioned, it's almost half a year now with no local transmitted cases. So although we do not have local transmissions, we do still see at a border quarantine that returning visitors as well as our own citizens, many of them do have the virus that are detected during the hotel quarantine or the home quarantine. So people are still on alert. All the public transportations, people are all still wearing the mask and, of course, washing their hands, thermometers in the buildings when people enter and so on. But all this enabled a kind of like the Pride Parade, now in Gaoxiong, but also previously in Taipei. We have our inaugural transgender parade and things like that, so that allows for tens of thousands of people in the same place, all wearing masks, of course, if they can't keep the social distance, but otherwise life is normal. Could your Corona pandemic strategy be easily transferred to Europe, to Germany, or does your approach only work on islands surrounded by water? Well, there are parts of it such as the messaging strategy, right? Wear a mask to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands that are perfectly replicable. It doesn't depend on particular geographic instances. There are parts of it, for example, the digital fence, the digital quarantine that works only because we have broadband as a human ride and everywhere is enabled in 4G towers because we use the cell phone towers as quarantine measures. That depends on the underlying infrastructure. But I think most of the measures that we take with minimal adaptation can work everywhere. That includes the Hotline 1922 as well as the Centroepid Command Center, Life Press Conference, as well as a very cute spokes dog of the CECC that translates all the measures into easy-to-share, easy-to-remember dog memes. What happens if someone turns out to be infected? How do you monitor the quarantine? What's happening in Taiwan? Sure. We make sure that people are isolated. Their contact tracing is done through traditional contact tracing interviews. We make sure that their contacts, if they don't wear the proper personal protective equipment in the time of their interaction, then of course they are also asked to either go to a hotel for the hotel quarantine where they are physically barred from leaving for 14 days, but they can also choose to home quarantine in which case their phone is put into the digital fence and again we pay them a stipend of around 30 euros during the quarantine session. But if they break out of the quarantine they pay us back a thousand times more as a fine. Okay. In Germany we have a strict understanding of data protection. It refers to our history with the Stasi and the GDR and the Gestapo and the Serb Reich. So people are very aware of data protection. So is that a problem? Are we too anxious? I was born in 1981 and when I was born Taiwan was still under the martial law. And of course we understand how it's like to be essentially having a surveillance state making sure that people are afraid of each other, of snitching on each other and so on. That's all part of our history as well as referred to as the white terror. So after we democratized and had our first presidential election in 1996 we vowed to never go back there. And the reason is that we understand that the liberty of expression and of the media freedom and so on are the best early warnings against not only emergency and disasters but also unknown dangers such as the pandemic. The freedom of speech allowed the PTT, that's the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit run by the National Taiwan University to discover the Dr. Lee Wen-Liao's whistleblowing so Dr. Lee really saved the Taiwanese people because we have the media and speech freedom here. And so to answer your question, of course we care a lot about the government must never collect new data to use the pandemic as an excuse. That's the general heuristics. All the data collection methods that we deploy during the pandemic has already precedence before the pandemic and we repurpose of course some of the data collection tools but we do not invent new data collection methods because the cyber security and privacy implications would be very fuzzy during a pandemic and we do not want people to basically rebel or to make a statement by refusing to work with each other. And so the decentralized approach of data collection for example when you're visiting a hostess bar or a host bar your contact may be stored on scratch pads on that particular business place or not asked, neither is the business asked to use your real name or a real email you can use a throwaway email, the whole point is just to contact you if there is a local transmission that happened in the place and if nothing happened after four weeks it's shredded so nobody gets the data. But just for me, do you have something like a tracking app? We do not have a tracking app. We've never rolled out an app from the state that asking people to do the tracking some nearby East Asian countries do have such a contact tracing app but Taiwan has never deployed one and the reason is that we've never entered the community-spread stage of the pandemic and therefore there's less need for such an app but we do of course use existing like cell phone tower triangulation methods to enforce the digital quarantine. Can you explain that again for me maybe a little bit shorter that I can use it so? Yeah, sure. Of course we can redo this many times. So do we have to change our mindset in times just in times of pandemics regarding data protection, what do you think about that? Well, I think the state, if the state trusts its citizens and refrain from collecting new data in the name of the pandemic then the citizens will trust each other more and much more likely to invent new social innovations to counter the pandemic together such as the scratch pads used in nightlife businesses districts around Taiwan when we asked them to invent a real contact system to notify the customers in case of a local outbreak they invented such a system without submitting any data to the central authority. Is this better? I think so, yeah. Because maybe there were some mistakes in some articles things happen to fake news maybe but I read in an article that there is something like a tracking app in Taiwan so you tell me that's not true? Well, there were many tracking apps being developed in Taiwan it's just they were not deployed. There were developments for example of a Bluetooth-based contact tracing app by AI labs I think they end up working with their UK counterparts but it's not put into actual deployment in Taiwan because we've never entered the community's spread stage but even for example the triangulation of cell phone towers we use that already before the pandemic for the earthquake warning system for the flood warning system and so on so people understand it's very coarse grain it has a very rough whereabouts information about your phone that's about 15 meters and it can send SMS but it cannot track whether you have acted based on the SMS information because it's not an app on your phone so you can turn off the GPS, turn off Bluetooth, turn off Wi-Fi and this triangulation will still work. So is there any data that the government is collecting right now which was not collecting before the pandemic? Well, as a rule we do not do that it's as simple as that I think what we have shown to the world is that you can repurpose existing data collection endpoints for example the community trusted pharmacists who are already collecting data about the national health insurance for refillable prescriptions for chronic diseases so when we roll out mask rationing people understand if they bring the IC card with them they can get the rationed mask they can also give the IC card to their trusted family members and they can also get the rationed mask for them but they also understand this is exactly like the previous use of the IC cards of the national health insurance in that it can only be used for public service and will never be sold or processed by third party commercial vendors. What about the Taiwanese population? Do they follow the politics or is there also like people who are not understanding what's going on but demonstrating is there any difference from European countries or what's your impression? I think the main difference is that we already have a societal inoculation in 2003 when SARS-1.0 hit Taiwan there was of course a lot of chaos a lot of confusion and things like that but this time around well most people above 30 years old remember how bad it was in SARS-1.0 so they wore the mask even before the government started telling them to wear the mask they kept the distance even before we were out of social distance when we say keep the distance or wear a mask many people keep the distance and wear a mask and so in that sense it is a social sector first approach to combat the coronavirus From your point of view what is German politics or European politics doing wrong with Europe especially German learn from Taiwan we had this question before but I ask you again can we learn from Taiwan and also other Asian countries in dealing with the crisis? Well I think because this is your first exposure to this kind of coronavirus to SARS you're doing actually quite well if we compare your response with the Taiwan response in 2003 but of course we have the benefit of our SARS-1.0 experience and so we can share our best practices around quarantine around the mask use and hand sanitization around the communication materials how to make sure that the rational self-interest instead of altruism is the core of the message how to make the masks fashionable so that people who want to make a point can wear a mask to make a point and things like that and so all these are the norms not necessarily laws and regulations that Taiwan experienced the Taiwan model can contribute to the society in Europe As a conclusion what advice do you have for the German political class and the whole society concerning the fight against the pandemic? Well do what Taiwan did after SARS-1.0 in 2004 in the kind of retrospective session looking at what went wrong during SARS-1.0 not only did our constitutional court charged the parliament to make the communicable disease act the design of the CECC the centripetal command center all the acts that's pre-authorized in its power to make sure that the measures can be implemented in a truly cross-sectoral and cross-ministerial fashion all that is written into the law because we have the same continental law system as Germany everything has to be pre-approved by the parliament so the parliament working with the constitutional court really need to do a retrospective soon as I think the vaccine is available for this particular version of SARS and also I would recommend that we prepare against this kind of emerging threats this global kind of pandemic and infodemic and climate change together as a world community now that we are in the habit of video conferencing each other much more frequently let's keep doing so Can we do that again a little shorter like maybe at the end of the report and after that there will be the talk in the studio so what can we learn from Taiwan? Well you can learn from Taiwan like we did in 2004 right after SARS 1.0 the constitutional court worked with the parliament to reveal all the ideas that went wrong during the SARS 1.0 and codified the correct responses into the Communicable Disease Act that pre-authorized the Central Epidemic Command Sansa with the necessary power to work across sectors and across ministries we can keep video conferencing each other for global scale issues such as pandemic, infodemic and climate change Do you have the impression that politicians from Europe are they calling you? Do they want to get information or do you think why is no one calling me? We can give good information because we have the experience Well we work with for example some members of the parliament in Germany I was part of a hearing session about the country and the pandemic but also the infodemic so we have pretty good start pretty good beginnings but of course we can always do more And now my last question you are on an island not only surrounded by water but you don't have the virus in your country more or less so Well only at the border at the quarantine hotels but yes of course but the life is more or less normal of course you have social distancing and the face mask but you don't have that fear that people have maybe here in Europe or even in the US how does it feel how is the normal life right now in Taiwan what is going to be on that island? So I feel quite relieved of course that was the all society approach that we have countered the coronavirus and moved to a post-pandemic lifestyle for almost half a year now since September also our revenue of retail and catering have gone to the highest point as of this century because people don't go abroad for tourism they go inbound inward for tourism so that also helps to recover the small and medium enterprises so there is a I guess quiet celebration going on in Taiwan but that also means we have more time and peace of mind to work on solving the issues on a global scale to contribute to science research and communication okay I think that's it maybe you have something you want to add so let's keep working on this together and as Lerner Cohen would say ring the bells that still can ring and forget your perfect offering for there is a crack a crack in everything and that is how the light gets in and live long and prosper thank you very much okay we're good I think that's it we're good thank you very much for your time and you got my email address yes I have two clips and I will send it to you via WeTransfer right now that's great thank you very much as we say here good local time bye