Hello, I'm Audrey Tang.
I'm really happy to be here to share with you some thoughts around how Taiwan countered
the coronavirus using the power of digital social innovation.
Social innovation, that is to say people who participate from all walks of life in order
to publicly benefit the society, is the cornerstone of Taiwan's collective intelligence
response system, and it's really fast.
Whereas many jurisdictions began countering coronavirus only this year, Taiwan started
last year. Last December, when Dr. Li Wenliang — the PRC whistleblower — posted that
there are new SARS cases.
He got inquiries and eventually punishments from his local police institutions, but at
the same time the Taiwan equivalent of reddit, the PTT board has somebody with the name "nomorepipe"
reposting Dr. Li Wenliang's whistleblowing.
Instead of facing discipline, the head of the CDC immediately noticed this post and
issued a order that says that all passengers flying from Wuhan to Taiwan need to start
health inspections the very next day -- the first day of 2020.
This says two things.
First, the civil society trust the government enough to talk about possible new SARS outbreaks
in a public forum, and that the government trusts the citizens enough to take it seriously
and treat it as if SARS has happened again, something we've always been preparing since
2003.
Because of this open civil society -- according to the CIVICUS Monitor, Taiwan is the most
open society in the whole of Asia -- we enjoy the same freedom of speech, the same freedom
of assembly, of the press and so on, as other liberal democratic countries, but with the
emphasis on keeping an open mind to new, novel ideas from the society.
This is why our schools and businesses still remain open today.
For example, every day our central epidemic command center (CECC) holds a press conference
which is livestreamed.
We work with the journalist community, they answer all the questions from the journalists
which is also live streamed.
Because of this, whenever there's new ideas coming from the civil society, anyone can
pick their phone and call 1922 and tell that idea to the CECC.
For example, there was one day in April that a young boy that said they don't want to go
to school because their schoolmates may laugh at him for wearing a pink medical mask.
The very next day, everybody in the CECC press conference started wearing pink medical masks,
making sure that everybody learns about gender mainstreaming, which is again a social innovation.
This kind of fast response builds trust between the government and the civil society.
Another focus is fairness.
For example, when we ramped up the facial mask production, making sure that everybody
can use their national health insurance card to collect masks from nearby pharmacies, fairness
is the guiding principle.
Not only do we publish the stock levels of all the pharmacies, we actually publish it
every 3 minutes.
That's why g0v and many community contributors built more than 130 tools that enables people
who prefer viewing maps or people with blindness who prefer to hear from voice assistants as
well as people who are using the chatbots -- like the LINE platform which is very popular
-- all of them can get the same inclusive access to the information about which pharmacist
near them still have masks.
Because Taiwan has more than 99.9% of health coverage, people who show any symptom will
then be able to take medical masks, go to a local clinic, knowing that they will get treated
fairly and without incurring any financial burden.
This also enabled people to make dashboards that lets people see that our supply is indeed
growing, that we now can collect -- if you're an adult -- 9 facial mask every 2 weeks,
or 10 if you are a child.
This also shows us where in Taiwan do we have oversupply or under supply and we change with
the pharmacies, based on the real feedback of the pharmacists so that their received
supplies as well as the ordering system is also co-created with the whole of society.
Based on this analysis, as you can see our premier smiling happily here, that is because
we started working with convenience stores that can take the same NHI card to go there
and collect your mask anytime, 24 hours a day.
Because there's many people working in municipalities that have a longer working hour than pharmacists
and so before when we only rationed through pharmacies, they could miss the mask collection
simply because they worked too late in the day.
So we ensure fairness of all kinds.
Finally, I would like to stress that because this is a stressful time, people feel anxious,
there's a lot of panic buying, a lot of conspiracy theories.
In Taiwan, our counter disinformation strategy is based on the idea of "humor over rumor."
When there is the panic buying of tissue papers, there was a rumor that says it's the same material
as facial masks and there was panic buying.
The same premier smiling in the previous slide now shows his bottom and says -- in a very
large print -- that we only have one pair of buttocks each, meaning that we don't need
to panic buy tissue papers.
It then shows a very clear table saying that facial masks are produced using Taiwanese
materials and the tissue paper are produced using South American materials.
This went absolutely viral and because of that, the panic buying of tissue papers died
down within a day or two.
Finally, we found out that person who spread the rumor at the first place was a tissue
paper reseller.
This is not just a single-shot point in the social media.
Every single CECC daily press conference gets translated by the Ministry of Health and Welfare
spokesdog or 總柴 the "Doge CEO", that translated social distancing, hand sanitation rules,
remembering to pay your pre-orders and so on, all into very cute dog memes.
Because this goes viral, we make sure that our humor, our factual humor, spreads faster
than rumor.
This is how we make sure that Taiwanese people still feel calm and collected even during
the pandemic.
I only have five minutes, and this is all I can contribute within five minutes, but
please feel free to read more here: TaiwanCanHelp.us
Thank you for listening.