South Korea adopted our system. South Korean people were using the same mask map produced in Tainan, [laughs] even though Finjon Kiang did not know any Korean language, [laughs] but they both speak JavaScript and OpenAPI. [laughs] It was just a universal language. [laughs] They were able to convince the ...
These three together I think have more than 10 million users, but actually there’s more than one hundred different application of voice assistance, you name it. I personally quoted a website, mask.pdis, that lists all the one hundred or so applications. All taken together, I don’t know, but a majority ...
These three together covers maybe 10 million users. Each of them, using their preferred method, can see where are their nearby pharmacies and how much medical mask do they have in stock, so they don’t have to queue in pharmacies that are out of stock.
The map. That’s not my idea. [laughs] It’s a social innovation done by people in Tainan. Started with Howard Wu (吳展瑋) and later on Finjon Kiang (江明宗) and also the HTC DeepQ team which does the line bot for the CDC (疾管家).
There are three systems all. After the three system gets introduced, now more than 21 million people have used one of the three venues which, considering we’re just 23 million people, is a huge success.
That empowers, for example, migrant workers who often use prepaid SIM to go to their nearby convenience store and instead of using their phone or a computer, they just insert the NHI card to a kiosk at a convenience store, and then they collect at the same store a week ...
However, this mostly requires a phone that’s owned by yourself, instead of prepaid SIM card, because we need to validate that you are yourself, and so you don’t double spend, so to speak. After a month, after 2.0, we did 3.0.
They go off-work when the pharmacies already close, in which case they have no way to get a mask. For these people we introduced a e-preordering system online, where they can pre-order and collect after a week in their nearby convenience store which opens 24 hours at a time.
Then, the next wave is what we call eMask or Mask 2.0. Based on analysis, we see that Mask 1.0 reaches only 70 percent of population for good reason. Independent analysis from the civil society shows in those districts, with very long-working hours in large municipalities or science parks, people ...
The good thing about this is that it requires just a little bit of patience, because there was queuing, but it’s guaranteed that people who do have the time will get the mask.
Sure. There’s actually three systems. [laughs] There’s the Mask 1.0, which is everybody can purchase mask in pharmacies, 6,000 of them, using their national health insurance card which covers 99.99 percent of population including not just citizens but also residents of more than six months. That’s the first measure.
It’s about reminding others to protect themselves. If you say, “Wearing a mask is a sign of respect,” for example, that’s harder to spread.
It’s the incentive design that’s different. When I wear a mask in Taiwan, I protect me from myself. This is a very simple to explain idea. I can remind the people that I care to protect their own health. That’s a very natural human expression.
The second thing is that in places where seeing each other’s expressions is important, it’s of course superior to mask.
That’s another portable shield. [laughs] It serves two purposes. First, it’s also a social signal, although not as strong as mask because it says nothing about hand sanitation, but it says something about not touching your face. It’s maybe half of strong as a social signal.
The face…
In the cafes that you just mentioned, many of them installed this transparent plastic or glass shielding between the seats, in which case, of course, that serves as physical distance. You don’t have to wear a mask when you’re drinking because you’re shielded, literally.
As I demonstrated, I keep a mask with me in my pocket all the time. Whenever I cannot keep physical distance, I wear a mask. It’s that simple.
Or places where you really do need to drink, right? [laughs]
The next one is alcohol hand sprays.
Soap is the most important technology.
Of course.
Based on water usage and other proxy metrics, we know that people across Taiwan, no urban or rural difference, are washing their hands much more vigorously than before.
The social signal is the part that has a effect on a larger crowd of people because just a few people wearing sends a signal that remind the other people, if they cannot keep a physical distance, to wear a mask, to protect themself from their own hands.
It doesn’t matter whether this is made of fabric, like t-shirt, literally, or medical mask or surgical or even N95 – I imagine you wouldn’t be able to wear it all day – because it’s a signal.
Two, it signals that I’m washing my hands properly because we all know in Taiwan that wearing a mask is useless without washing your hands properly. If I wear a mask, it means that I’m washing my hands properly. Because it’s a social signal, it remind other people to take ...
Certainly. As I explained to BBC, wearing a mask in Taiwan is a social signal. It signals two things. First, I’m protecting myself from my own hands because I wouldn’t be touching my mouth all the time.
Thank you. Cheers, bye.
Thank you. I’ll send you the high-quality recording on my side.
Thank you.
This is a rational thing to do because of the universal healthcare coverage, 99,99 percent, everybody who show any symptom, COVID or not will get treated fairly and without incurring any financial cost other than the five euros of the registration fee on the clinic.
If you really need it now, like if you start developing symptoms and things like that, you can just go to your nearest pharmacy and collect the mask, and put it on and go to a clinic or something.
The pharmacies, because the convenience stores are operating on a preordering basis. You take your card there, you swipe, and then you receive the mask a week or so afterwards. There’s no stock level.
That’s why after a while we decide to partner with convenience stores on a preordering system, because there’s many municipalities where people work very late in the day, and therefore will miss the mask collection because they work longer hours than the pharmacist. That is again a case of evidence-based ...
No matter who you are and where you are, you can access where are your nearest pharmacy that still have some mask in stock, and thereby reduce the queueing and also increase the people’s confidence that the supply is indeed growing. Also informs the distribution strategy, because we know exactly ...
If your visibility or eyesight is not that good, you switch to chatbot or a voice assistant or something that is more friendly to people with blindness as well as people speaking different languages and so on.
If you’re a child, every two weeks 10 medical mask, and you can see the stock level of that pharmacy on your phone depleting by 9 or 10 on the adult or child column every three minutes. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the publishing of statistics information every day is normal, ...
We start rationing it out through the pharmacies, and to the more than 6,000 pharmacies they receive a fixed amount of masks every day. They can sell it to anyone presenting their national health card. We have also a single-payer national health system here so that everybody who show their ...
This is very effective, but because of that, there was very confusing accounts of how many mask are there and things like that. Because of that, there’s a civil society, a civic hacker, someone who writes for the public benefit software programs who did a map that shows all the ...
If you show up in a gathering of 50 people, but only 5 people are wearing medical mask, they can apply social pressure reminding the other 45 people to take care of themselves, but actually they protect those 5 people.
In any case, it’s a sign that I’m protecting myself. As all of us know, it primarily protects others. Because of that, the social pressure works in a selfish way that is also prosocial.
Sure. At the very beginning, the medical mask everybody wants to buy it. In Taiwan it is very interesting, because it’s a signal that I’m taking proper care of myself, I’m wearing a medical mask to stop my hands to touch my mouth. I’m wearing the medical mask to show ...
We’ve not had any closure of schools or anything like that, so we’re not at a stage of community spread, and it’s been almost a month now with no new domestic confirmed cases. There’s a litany for those Bluetooth-based tracing apps.
Because of that, we have not had to use any up-level tracing, because we’ve never entered lockdown. There’s only 400 or so cases, and we know the contact history of most of them and all are using traditional interview methods and so on.
Of course, if their phone runs out of battery or stays for too long without moving or answering messages, the same thing happens. It is some encroachment on the privacy during those 14 days, but we do have a constitutional court ruling during SARS and after SARS when we did ...
In any case, what we have done instead is that we controlled this at the borders with quarantining. We use something called a digital fence, meaning that if people break out of their quarantine with their phone, then a automated SMS message is sent to local hostel managers and police ...
The quarantine’s provided by top hotels. We make sure that we thank you for the 14 days of your effort, and pays some 30 Euros per day stipend. If you break that home quarantine is 1,000 times that fine.
Now, if you visit Taiwan, you first have to be a returning resident and have a really good case for visiting at the moment. If you come from a high-risk place, the entire airplane or the passenger from a high-risk place goes into quarantine.
We’ve done a lot of contact-tracing, but we did not mandate any app-level data collection. Basically, we do not collect extra data for countering COVID whenever and wherever we could. What we have done instead is that we do testing on the borders. Taiwan being a bunch of islands, it’s ...