Right, so it's a great, great pleasure to have with me today Mr. Audrey Tang. You are the digital minister of Taiwan. Hello. So we will be talking a bit about the corona crisis which our two countries have faced with quite differently. My name is Marcus Carlson by the way. I am a mathematician and I have gotten involved in the Swedish debate about different strategies about how to deal with coronavirus. And we shall of course also talk about governance in general and maybe what we in Sweden can learn from Taiwan. Okay. And of course if you have questions for me I'm more than happy to answer in the manner that I can. But if we start with corona crisis, I think many people in Sweden are unaware. Taiwan is a country with 23 million people and you have seven deaths. It's been more than 100 days since we have a locally confirmed case. So we're firmly post-pandemic now and well into the stimulus phase. And did you ever close schools or? No, we have imposed no lockdown and no takedowns either for the infodemic part which we may get to later. But no, there was no lockdowns. Our schools took two weeks to gather the necessary equipment such as thermometers, of course hand sanitizers, masks and so on. So the school semester was moved two weeks later. But so the summer vacation begins in July 15 instead of July 1st. But otherwise no, we have had not closed any schools and most businesses remain open too. But this is fantastic and I think a bit of a shock to many Swedish people because here the discussion has been a lot about you can't stop this pandemic because stopping it would require closing schools. The economy will suffer so heavily and simply at the end of the day you create more problems for your country by trying to stop the pandemic than somehow just let it. I mean here the emphasis has been on keeping the spread at the rate so that the health system doesn't collapse. I think that that's of course very important. Yeah, we prioritize for example ensuring we have plenty of the so-called negative pressure wars and people who are deemed essential health workers for a while were discouraged from going to vacation overseas and we pay them of course extra pay and stipend and so on to keep them within Taiwan so that we have sufficient capacity. Of course capacity is the most important thing to think of. Right, but still so you have chosen a radically different path because you never had a wide community spread in Taiwan. That's exactly right. We have isolated community transmission but in each of those cases the transmission chain is fully contact traced and that in addition to the quarantine at the borders led to zero community spread. Zero community spread and but do you have a big exchange with mainland China? We did and that's why the first day of January we started health inspections for all flights coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan and that's I think 10 days earlier than almost everybody else and so starting early is important. We acted on the social media signal a whistleblower called Dr. Lee Wen Liang in Wuhan said in social media there's seven new confirmed SARS cases even though he would get quote harmonized unquote locally for a while. In Taiwan it's escalated to our medical officer within 24 hours and we acted very early on. Wow so what would you say are the key okay so you were early acted fast and I guess this is yeah but that's not enough. So fast of course gets you earlier in the curve but as long as the R value is above one fast can only do so much and so of course advanced deployment like setting up the central epidemic command center which holds daily life press conferences every day every 2 p.m. is very important but the hard thing to do is to make sure that people see that is a fair distribution of personal protective equipment namely medical mask. So in Taiwan we built a mask production from 2 million a day to 20 million a day within a short order like within a couple months and everybody can see using a civic technologist imagination is called a mask availability map. Everybody can see which pharmacies near them have how many adult and how many children's masks in stock and you can take your national health insurance card going there and collect nine if you're an adult every two weeks or 10 if you are a child and this ensure that more than 90 percent of population gained access to medical mask the other less than 10 percent perhaps already have some mask in stock and so all in all this created a sub one R value because people understood the importance of washing their hands properly using soap or hand sanitizers because we build mask as something that protects myself from my own washed hand and this is very important because it connects strongly mask use with soap use and then the R value become under one even before we introduce physical distancing rules and of course it became even lower after the physical distancing rules. Wow this is amazing so in Sweden we also have press conferences every day at two but I think the only common denominator is the recommendation to wash hands we had that here as well. Beyond that we are still not using masks and our authorities are reluctant to use masks because they claim it's not scientifically proven to work to protect you from your own hand of course it's scientifically proven that if you wear a mask you don't touch your own mouth I mean you probably mean that it's not scientifically proven that if the other people do not wear a mask and only I wear a mask whether it actually protects me from them but our idea was never about protecting myself from them it's about protecting me from myself and that of course is scientifically sound. Yes no I believe that I'm just and I will not go into argument with no I'm not arguing I'm just citing different incentives. Right no but here it's really the main idea communicated to the people is that it's not clear if masks will reduce the R value if everybody wears them so the recommendations here are wash your hands but they do not acknowledge asymptomatic spread so if one family member is sick in COVID-19 and another family member is not sick then that person goes to work. Well I mean I mean if there were no culture of wearing masks I can see it may be prudent to connect strongly mask to soap hand washing to physical distance before requiring people to wear a mask on public transport for a couple days we were ourselves deliberating that because we don't want people to wear a mask and get into a false sense of security and forget to wash their hands and keep social distance and so the main idea I think is that we wrote out a series of very funny memes that associates strongly mask use with hand washing and this includes from the spokes dog of the ministries of health and welfare to say use soap wash your hands wear a mask to protect you from doing this which is putting your hands to your mouth and cover when you're sneezing and things like that and when you're indoor keep three dogs away from each other and when you're outdoor keep two dogs away and so I agree without these mask use could be detrimental but we wrote this out very quickly like in February and so mask use was not a concern after people understand the basic epidemiology okay and you also do contact tracing of course of course and so here now primarily thanks to summer we believe because sweden somehow stops in summer and everybody goes to their summer cabin not everybody but many people a large part so I'm actually sitting in my summer cabin here now so our numbers are down we are still I forgot the exact figure but maybe even hundred times more than neighboring countries who did a lockdown and now is following a similar strategy to yours but compared to what it was we are down and the recommendation now here is that people should contact trace themselves so it's not the responsibility of the doctor to contact trace but it's the responsibility of the individual to call off people he might have infected any comments on that or in Taiwan we do both right we we expect people who are confirmed to remember who they have contacted in the past 14 days that of course helps and of course it's coming from them it's more convincing but we also do quarantine in airports and seaports when people go back to Taiwan it's 14 days quarantine either in a quarantine hotel or through the digital fans quarantining at home and so the main idea is through quarantining and not through people voluntarily agreeing to quarantine we enforce quarantine during the quarantine we pay you 33 US dollars a day as a stipend for your work but if you break out of the quarantine you pay us a thousand time that you can support 1000 people in quarantine by breaking the quarantine I'm sure and so there is a strong incentive for people to comply with the quarantine in rules and so it's a rational choice so I guess the fine the large sum of fine ensures that people understand the rules and work with the rules yeah you mentioned 14 days and that's something which have been mentioned here in Sweden by let's say opponents of harsher measures that if a large part of the population has to isolate for 14 days it's too much it will destroy the economy the works will not function and so on but I guess if you do it early on then the amount of people who have to quarantine is actually very small that's right that's right it's in the tens of thousands which is a large amount but it beats community transmission right so Taiwan is an island and and so is New Zealand which is another example of a nation which has successfully eliminated yes and one argument which I've heard here in the Swedish debate is that yes but these are islands so this is sort of the luxury of island nations to be able to be the pandemic in this way because they have they can control the borders to being an island any comments on that well in Sweden's case I'm not sure that you have problems controlling your borders I mean you you only border with what three countries so yeah that that's Norway Finland and Denmark if that counts right and so I don't think it really is that big a problem even if you're a non-island I think the main thing is whether you're willing to accept this mandatory 14-day quarantining if you do that then I'm sure that the other neighboring countries wouldn't object to Sweden imposing 14-day quarantines so so that's the that's the the main reading of course being an island helps but I think even for non-islandic countries if they get scientific arguments across to their neighboring countries I'm sure that something can be set up yeah I guess it boils down to numbers so clearly you can do this but I think the idea is that there's a much bigger flow of traffic when you have like land borders but do you know on the top of your head how what's the influx and outflux of travelers to and from Taiwan before the pandemic okay well so within a year I think it's around inbound is more than 10 10 million people a year right so so it's not it's not a small number and of course now that we have imposed very strict quarantining rules and so on during the pandemic of course there were days of like less than 1000 each day flying in to Taiwan because people who don't find 14-day quarantine attractive they will switch to telepresence video conference and things like that and as it's stabilized now at some level I mean would you say are you at half the volume than before the pandemic or a tenth or well since we are still maintaining the same quarantining rules we are basically only allowing citizens to return and then also necessary business travels but virtually no tourism and so I would say that we are a fraction of the incoming flow compared to pre-pandemic I see and for how long or how sustainable is this strategy I mean can you keep on for how long can you keep on doing but there's a standard answer right until there is a vaccine yeah so we are now at I think thousands of inbound and outbound combined thousands every day which is as I said a fraction of what we used to to look at previously it's easily a hundred times that so we're down to like less than one percent of the traffic flow as compared to pre-covid how sustainable is it well we are pretty safe when it comes to agricultural and tourism we have a lot of domestic tourism Taiwan is of course maintaining a very stable supply of ICT hardware manufacturing smart machinery which are of course not banned to travel because they are not human beings and so our economy remains strong we have a positive GDP growth disclosure which I think not many countries can say that and so the idea is that our economy actually somehow benefited especially in the production and industry because of covid because many of other manufacturing centers were hurt by the lockdowns but we never had a lockdown so people can you know order more products delivered from Taiwan and made in Taiwan and so because of that I think the economy is strong our stock exchanges at very high point actually higher than pre-covid and so we're looking at indefinitely continuing this policy until a vaccine is made available and how is life inside Taiwan like for a normal citizen yeah it's yeah it's it's normal it's normal you I walk to work we relax the gathering mass gathering rules already so people can just gather together watch movies hold concerts we've been doing professional baseball for quite a while now for a while the only place during professional baseball in the world we held our lgbt pride physically and and so life is normal we are firmly post-covid but of course we still keep the mask with us and if we're in a crowded space where we cannot keep physical distance we wear a mask to remind each other to wash our hands okay that's my father in the back sure sure yeah we are all getting more intimate with each other with those Skype conferences and so yeah another point is that the temperature checks and leaving your contact details in case there's a outbreak and alcohol handset sprays these are still compulsory so when you enter a public building for example all these are put into action okay so you do temperature check before entering a building okay okay very interesting and so so you are the digital minister that's right yes and I don't think we have a digital minister in sweden um what but I understood um or okay let me put the question like this how can digital tools be used um partially to fight the pandemic and in general to to have a more active democracy which I understand is somehow part of your role as a minister in Taiwan yes um so for the covid part of course the mask availability map the pre-ordering system for mask is very important so that people can see with their own devices and their preferred mode of access not only map but also voice assistance chatbots and so on and confirm for themselves that the mask production is indeed ramping up they can call 1922 and say that there's an oversupply or under supply and that's the daily press conferences for example when a boy called 1922 saying that he doesn't want to go to school because his schoolmates may bully him because he only have pink medical mask because when we ration you don't get to pick the color the very next day in a press conference everybody wore pink medical mask and suddenly the boy is the most hip boy because only he has the color that the heroes wear and so all this collective intelligence system are of course what digital can help and based on analysis we see that there's around 20 percent of people who never went to pharmacy to get a mask because they work long hours and after they get off work the pharmacy is closed and so we started working with convenience stores and our premier so jen chang smiling happily here signifies that you can collect your mask now 24 hours a day digital can also help on the humor part i shared this spokesperson of the ccc but our premier is also our spokesperson when there's panic buying for example of tissue papers there was a conspiracy theory spreading online traveling on outrage saying that the government have confiscated the tissue paper producers and forcing them to make masks they're of the same material so says the conspiracy theory and we will soon run out of tissue paper so people went out and buy in panic buying but very quickly we roll out this meme this internet picture with our premier wiggling his butt a little bit and then saying in large font each of us have only one pair of Botox saying that there's no need to stockpile is a wordplay because stockpile and butt sounds the same in Mandarin and right and there's a table here that says the tissue paper came from South American material and medical masks from domestic material so producing one doesn't hurt the production of the other and this was hilarious i mean you laughed and so people who laughed about it is physically unable to feel outrage at the same time about the same subject so that is to say it's a vaccination when people laughed about something they can't feel outrage and they can't take a part into the spreading of the conspiracy theory so as long as we have the r-value of our funny humor messages over one and spread faster than the rumor the rumor would die down just like herd immunity i guess we can call it nerd immunity and then this nerd immunity ensure that people feel calm and collected even during a pandemic so that's also how digital can help you can read a lot about it as tywin can help us okay i will for sure do that very interesting i read a bit about um your work with with more active democracy let's say and and also how to um encourage servicemen at different levels to engage instead of having like a top-down organization yeah i may horizontal ministry that's right yeah so for example when we first tackled uber uh when uber first came to taiwan they worked with people with no professional driver licenses in 2015 and so we use this polis tool which is an open source tool that's enable people to reflect on each other's positions so this avatar may be you and then you see a statement for example i think insurance for the passengers are very important uh it and you can click agree or disagree and as you do you will move toward people who feel similar to you so it's a uh dimensional reduction of the multi dimension like each question is one dimension um matrix and uh responses are people contributed meaning that you can also enter your own feelings for other people to upload or download and the clusters drawn by k-means clustering uh show what people feel the most alike and the most apart and so every time we run such a consultation the system automatically say that there's maybe five things that are ideological that people see as controversial but actually most people agree on most things uh with with most of their neighbors most of the time and these are rough consensus even though they get less media time of course because they're not controversial but the point is that every time we run a consultation well without a reply button uh you can always see the trolls lose interest because there's no reply button and we always get something that people can broadly agreed on and so we use this consultation not only for uber but also for for example the co-hack the coronavirus hackathon uh where we ask people around many different countries what are the norms that you feel um as acceptable uh to develop technologies on in uh six different broad categories of uh issues such as supporting frontline workers uh and doing a good allocation of resources making a smooth transition to a post-covid normal and things like that and so there are controversial points for example there's a american uh who point posted that we should develop a um ai at the icu instead of treating the people who come first or are the most severe we need to calculate their remaining contribution to the society and only treat the people who have a higher remaining value to the society uh and that is by the way um illegal in taiwan and not at all agreed as the norm uh by the asian folks uh in any case the point is that instead of wasting time on debating those controversial points we find the parts that everybody can agree on for example we need to have a personal diary on our phone that records our whereabouts but do not transmit it anywhere and when the contact tracer comes you can generate this one time link for the contact tracer to work with without revealing your uh families and friends personal details as you would during a traditional contact tracing interview now that's an idea that everybody can agree on so is a quick way to find this rough consensus uh the feeling part of the society uh before we develop the solutions wow this is this is so fascinating to talk to you and i'm a mathematician so we could you know dive into uh that but i will avoid that now i have so many different questions so i'm i'm even confused which way to go but um let me focus on on what we were talking before about masks and that in taiwan masks were equally distributed to the whole country in sweden the original response to the pandemic was very much guided by a lack of um tools or equipment yes so due to new management rules from the 90s they had dismantled a lot of like in the old style governance of sweden we had big uh stocks of you know masks and we had 50 field hospitals and so on um but this was expensive to keep so we gave it away most of the field hospitals went to africa and then when the pandemic hit we didn't have much or hardly anything um but what this pandemic has shown in sweden is also um a sort of parallelization of the state machine because there were many private initiatives by people who have companies or so on trying to connect to authorities saying okay i can find these masks for you let's say within fast and in large numbers and they were not picked up on one one who was uh in border of masks he said you know he needed an answer fast and the government official told him uh that he has to fill out the form and wait for two weeks and he said i cannot wait for two weeks this uh you know i then the deal is no longer in two weeks so this has shown a sort of parallelization where and i i think my take on it is this if you're a civil servant at some mid-level yes and you take personal initiative to let's say okay you say you go a bit outside the protocol and you say okay buy that because we need these masks then you can get punished if things are not uh yeah we we we have that uh very early on uh we were uh buying those um uh mask uh production parts like the supersonic um part that makes the masks uh and so um but what we're doing uh instead of importing masks uh we're making sure that we retain the capacity of producing masks so what we procure uh was machine parts uh not masks themselves but of course it was a procurement outside of procurement rules uh and so our minister of economy now our vice premier uh Sharon Zin uh as well as his deputy now our ministry of minister of economy affairs Wang Meihua and also the then vice premier Chen Xi Mai they collectively took upon themselves uh to assign those um um extra uh normal uh procurement rules so that when uh the judiciary or the corrective uh the the examiners uh came to uh hold them to account at least people in the middle management positions would not um get uh um reprimanded uh because it's the ministers and uh vice premier as orders uh and so but it was I'm sure flagged by mid-level uh civil servants but it was absorbed the political risk was absorbed by the top management uh almost instantly okay yeah so what I'm getting at here is that first civil servant at some mid-level to do nothing it's often the safer choice for yourself for your own career if you do nothing you did nothing wrong if you do something you can later get blamed for that and um yeah but that's minister's job a minister job is to absorb the risk right so so how do you encourage initiative like a civil servant yeah by by by saying if you innovate and you do something right you get the credit if you innovate and you get something wrong it's my fault that's that's my way of working with public service fantastic um on the topic of uh okay so you you were also talking before of uh how you use digital tools for the to help with the contact tracing right so I guess this everybody who has a mobile phone today the mobile phone checks where you are and and so if one is sick then you can contact trace somehow by just checking physically where where the person has been um this is what used in Sweden and the main argument against it is privacy or integrity that this could somehow be misused by government or or or you know sold maybe information about your private um life what's your comment on that I mean is it like this or are the ways around we we have not introduced uh any GPS collecting um apps for COVID management from the government specifically because uh of the same privacy concerns uh and uh there's a saying right anything that's introduced when I'm born uh that's already there when I'm born is human nature uh and anything invented after I'm born is technology uh and so to paraphrase that we can say anything uh that we have deployed as a government before the pandemic is normal and anything that's invented after the pandemic is technology uh to uh that people don't necessarily trust and so our toolkit is to repurpose what we already had deployed because Taiwan has earthquake all the time and also typhoon and heavy flood uh we have the system uh that automatically sends uh short messages sms or cell broadcasting to a a fence a geofenced area so that for example when there's earthquake there was one last night uh people in the earthquake affected area uh would receive a quick message even before the earthquake is felt and so people already uh are familiar with this and it's based on cell phone tower triangulation it doesn't use GPS it just says if those three cell phone towers um draw three circles and they intersect to find my phone within around a 50 meter uh arrow margin uh in urban areas and if this is within the earthquake's affected zone then I get an sms automatically so it doesn't require me to install an app or anything like that and so the digital fence that is the quarantining use the same system but uh now it's you and also the police and also your community managers receiving a sms if you break out of your 15 media uh 50 meter radius quarantine so it's seen as more previously preserving because we do not know unlike GPS we do not know which room you are in and we only attract you for 14 days since you return home after the 14th day there really is no constitutional basis for us to keep doing this anymore and so it's seen as a narrow deep but very transparent accountable and understandable uh way of uh trading off uh the privacy and if you really don't like your film being monitored you can always go to a physical quarantine hotel in which case you're physically far from leaving for 14 days and we still pay you a stipend okay but okay so let me get this straight so you are not using them um phones in order to actively contact trace in case you have a case inside of the country you do not follow is where about uh to find other people you might have met or so that's right that's right not as a rule there are exceptions for example if you are on an important business trip uh and you come from relatively mild country uh then you can shorten your 14 day quarantine to five days but the remaining nine days uh you have to be unfixed itinerary that is to say you have to say where you are going and take a cab not a public transport and the cab is of course uh with the shielding and so on and so in which case the digital fence extends to the place that you're visiting uh so that's could also be configured but that's um more exceptional just a few cases but as a rule yeah it's static uh just in the place you're quarantining yeah okay um switching focus a bit so so your work is much about finding consensus uh governing in a way that somehow resonates with the people yes he has been a lot of debate about the schools in sweden we have a wide community spread now i i don't have the latest figures now but um we are for sure above a few hundred new cases every day so the the disease is out there it's fizzling around it's not as bad as it was but but it's there and it gets um you know into schools we had a teacher who died and um so some parents are very happy about schools being open because it means uh it's difficult to be home for a long time with your children um well other parents especially parents who are maybe in the risk group who are at high risk of dying from covid uh the the controversy there was that they are forced to send their kids to school so they are not given the choice of homeschooling their their kids until the pandemic is over meaning that the government comes in and says it's send the kid to school and accept the risk or there will be some some fine or even social authorities can come and make some investigation um i'm just curious how does that sound in in your years i mean how would taiwanese people react if this was was taiwan well i guess they will first ask as was the case when we first um basically postponed reopening of schools um they will ask are there temperature checkers uh in every classroom are there sufficient amount of masks and are the children uh being taught to wash their hands with soap very thoroughly uh and keeping physical distance um and if all the four requirements are met it's generally seen as safe because well scientific evidence shows that if you do all four measures together the r value is under one uh but if you if you do not have all four measures in place of course it could be placing people in risk yes and what would be the taiwanese i mean sentiment about such let's say so you don't have the mask you don't have the temperature checks and you're forced to send your kids to school well then people would argue that we should postpone the opening of schools until all schools have those prerequisite uh components yeah i guess that's uh that's a logical uh what's the logical response from the scientific evidence i mean this is not about sentiment this is about risk uh calculation yeah but but you said something that scientific evidence is a word which is very common in the swedish debate but here it is more like you know so the different levels of scientific evidence for example about you know face masks um you there haven't been any how do you call it randomized control trials you know where you take one group select them and and they don't have the mask and then the i mean so there's a lot of evidence that face mask work but we don't have this highest level of scientific uh evidence yet at least uh in what's been proven and then the swedish authorities take on this is that okay it's not 100 proven that mask work well in you mean in social settings right because there are publications in medical settings and these are rcts right but here they're saying that these publications are not as strong and if you use it in public then maybe it has some negative consequences also so i'm just telling you what the debate is so basically what they're saying is we don't have a hundred percent proof that mask work therefore we shall not use them because we are evidence based well i mean there are rcts in medical uh settings i agree there's not as much rcts in non-medical settings but uh there really shouldn't be a difference i mean uh if people understand the epidemiology behind it that is to say if people wash their hands as a medical worker or nurse would then obviously the mask would have the same effect as medical workers or nurses i mean this is just common sense so i think it boils down to a sociological argument that if people could not be trusted to use their masks properly then i agree mask may not have its indented effect by in taiwan we see that as a challenge and say okay so we now have to work on the digital memes those limericks lyrics whatever to make sure that people understand to probably use the mask first wash your hands properly with soap otherwise the mask is of no use and so on uh and so making sure that everybody understand the science behind it in which case it gets into the territory of the rct proven evidence-based mask efficacy right so rct is randomized controlled trial it's a scientific thing i'm just filling in maybe for all scientific listeners here um right um right so so in taiwan you trust the people to do the right thing you educate them and you give them responsibility to all these guidelines that sounds very similar to sweden it's just that the guidelines are diametrically opposite so that's what the swedish officials also say we trust people to do the right thing but they are probably not they're not capable of using the mask properly so we omit that and yeah so it's a logical argument both way right when one side doesn't disprove the other it's based on a very different assumption of how people behave that's the main difference and it's uh what we call the the uh the pigmalion effect right okay yeah the the pigmalion effect or the rosenthal effect is a psychological phenomenon i'm just quoting wikipedia or in if you have high expectations of someone that someone will improve their performance and if you have a low expectation of that someone that person will have a lower performance so in either case it's a self-fulfilling prophecy fascinating um i'm also thinking about the um my final point here i guess we we're we're reaching the hour um so i'm thinking of this from uh different strategies of dealing with the pandemic um from an equality or maybe uh discrimination perspective um so you are a transgender woman as i understand yes this this is probably then something you also have um thought about i guess in or a counter decline um in taiwan with your strategy different groups of society the old the high-risk group the children they do equal effort to keep everybody else safe right so that's right but we also restrict visits to long-term care facilities until may i think and also limit the number of people who can get to their family members when they were hospitalized the people who go to visit them were also restricted in number and so we make sure to protect the medical workers and people who are nurses in those long-term health care centers and so on and these were our priorities so yes everybody do their part of course but the medical and nurse workers are still the most essential to be protected yeah you mentioned old homes or all care facilities um was it completely prohibited to visit your elderly relatives or for a few for a few months it was it was restricted to video only okay yeah yeah so this is the same here so what we see in sweden now is the numbers are down a lot and indeed it has gone down faster than many of the epidemiologic epidemiological models predicted which we are still struggling to to understand a bit why our antibody levels do not resonate with with uh with the epidemic dying out but it's believed that a large so we still have community spread but very relatively few people died we still have deaths i don't have the latest figures but uh some weeks back it was 20 persons per day that died from COVID-19 and this is considered very positive in sweden because we were up at much higher in the peak it was a hundred cases per day so this is uh somehow I caught on here so on one hand we have community spread but on the other hand the death toll goes down and it's believed that this is because uh basically the older generation and those at risk group are self isolating which means that you take the elderly population and the risk group and basically they are not able to live a normal life until there is a vaccine so that the rest of the people the the younger and middle age can have a more or less normal life until the risk of vaccine so there's a big difference if in which group you are in sweden if you're young and healthy you go on as normal if you're old or fragile you're even scared of going to to to do your shopping right so yeah what do you think of this from a quality or discrimination perspective well first of all you mentioned the antibody testing uh in taiwan we tend not to rely solely or even primarily on those specifically because the epidemiological dynamic between the antibody levels and the memory T cells are not very well understood at this point yeah and and so we basically rely on pretty much just rtpcr but of course augmented with so-called rapid tests when rtpcr is not feasible but we i'm sorry rtpcr can you spin that out sure a rtpcr is a testing of the real-time polymerize chain reaction oh okay yeah yeah yeah so so i mean i mean that's the the standard the go standard of virus testing and we managed to have active virus basically that's right and and we make a lot of work with all the labs around taiwan so we can have on average just a few hours turn around and they work like well into the night in weekends and so on to to shorten the time it takes but what we have found is that really that of course the the kind of age groups or vulnerability groups these are i guess it's a little bit like measuring whether you have a fever like that those thermometers of course it works to a degree but it also the fourth positive and negative is too strong if you only rely on such age groups or vulnerability groups symptoms groups and so usually we do not make policies based on these except for for the long-term healthcare but that's also to protect the healthcare workers the nurses and doctors there but otherwise no we don't discriminate based on the age groups and so on we simply rely on rtpcr for pretty much everything and so if you have are asymptomatic and you're young and and so on in taiwan you have probably the same chance of getting discovered and screened as as you would if you're a very elderly or even obese person yes so about the antibodies and the t-cells i agree completely but it's not clear but well okay sorry i'm collecting my thoughts um my my question is um a strategy which allows the disease to go through society and relies on the elderly people to isolate to self isolate in order to for indefinite time or until the risk of vaccine basically would you say that that's discriminatory against the the elderly population well i need more details uh before i can answer that i mean when the first we introduced this banning of visits to long-term healthcare there was also some backlash but then we explained that it's mostly to protect the frontline medical workers who are important resource to the country similarly when there were a case of a person who initially gets confirmed and of a covid positive and during the first contact tracing interview she said that she is living very simply at home hanging with friends very rarely and so everybody wondered why in the medical officer's team but the very next day she confessed that she is actually a professional working as a waitress in an intimate bar and she initially did not tell the contact tracing that because she was afraid that she would compromise the privacy of her clients in the intimate drinking places and so right afterward our sec said until such a day when the intimate bars and dancing clubs nightclubs can keep a safe physical distance and instruct all their patrons to leave a real contact number in case the outbreak like this occurs um then they will just have to shut down uh but they uh they did this shut down i mean the ccc did not impose any kind of criminal persecution nor was there a large fine or anything basically the ccc just said you have to understand the science behind it you cannot operate uh ignorant of the science and at the time there was also some backlash people were saying uh it's ridiculous for the ccc to say if they can keep a physical distance the intimate bars are supposed to break uh physical distance that's the entire point of going to intimate bars and dancing clubs um and and so um of course it was also uh built as discrimination against certain professional workers i mean they are professional workers but however after a few weeks there are some intimate bars that discovered that if they wear a cap with plastic shielding then you can see each other well you can't kiss each other i guess but you can still drink behind this plastic shield and keep a safe distance from one another and they agreed to have their patrons write down their numbers on a physical paper and they check through sms that these numbers are indeed the phone they're holding on their hunt but they can use a pseudonym that is to say they don't have to review their real name going into an intimate bar and if there's no outbreak in dot bar for four weeks uh then on a rotating basis all those collected sheets of paper uh four weeks before are shredded so that uh they would not be kept into permanent record and after doing these measures the municipalities gradually allow the intimate bars and dancing club to reopen that is to say they're part of this scientifically backed uh new normal of the covid thing but in the very beginning when this challenge is issued and there was no feasible way of conforming to that in intimate bars it does look like discrimination so so i guess it's a balancing act and uh innovation always comes from the civil society that has a firm understanding of the science involved yeah and now we're we're we're getting a bit into the topic that i would love to talk about but but i guess uh it will take too long namely governance in general smart to have more interactive uh dialogue and i guess maybe next time yeah that's right that's right and if you're if you're interested uh in uh the measures that i just talked about uh i mean the viewers uh you can check uh taiwan can help that us which is this website uh that a civil society not the government of taiwan have put together is at taiwan can help that us and there's far more uh written there as well as some youtubers or uh our vice president at the time vp chan jian read recording a crash course on epidemiology because he's uh the vice president but also literally the author of the textbook on epidemiology fantastic this is great uh one final question is uh so we're now heading towards autumn we're still in the middle of summer but uh autumn is on on the horizon um we still have a community spread in sweden but it is way down and a vaccine is still not nearby let's say and it's believed of course when the colder temperature comes uh in sweden we have you know summer and then winter and an autumn in between we mainly have autumn to be honest i see what you're saying yeah okay so it's gonna get colder right in a month or so um what would your recommendation be for sweden at this point in time how to deal with this pandemic until until the vaccine comes around um so my main uh idea of course uh is that you should really wear a mask to protect you from your own unwashed hands that it really is the message that i want to get across thank you so much all the time speaking with you has been a great pleasure um i wonderful that you took the time to speak with me here in sweden um i wish you the best of luck and the taiwanese people yes um thank you and uh i wish you live long and prosper okay thank you bye bye