Tech Driven Covid-19 Prevention? (Taiwan, A Haven For Body And A Hell For Mind)
At the beginning of the pandemic, several designers from Taiwan has purchased a front-page ad on NYTimes, in response to the false accusations made by WHO director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The bold claim ‘Taiwan can help’ was made due to the ‘miracle’ with little to no infections within the border. The geographic advantages and being among the earliest movers to prevent against the disease bought Taiwan enough time to develop its unique response and public health discourse.
Tech-savvy Governance, Starting From Everyday Tech
One repeated component stood out amongst the government campaigns and media coverage, Technology. As one of the largest suppliers in semi-conductor industry, Taiwan was a naturally built reservoir of high-tech talents and solutions. The early strategies leaned on everyday tech, like cell service and SMS text messaging.
Since Taiwan was an outlier that prevented community spread, the Government turned to the border and put heavy restrictions on passengers who entered through immigration. For instance, all border entries automatically resulted in a 14 day at home quarantine (with very few exceptions of business travel and medical emergencies). After the highly infectious Omicron variant became dominant, the Government doubled down and imposed a 14 day quarantine in designated, centralized locations.
With each border entry, the government collected each person’s mobile phone number, and activated the tracing through different carriers. From there, a 14 day long, digital footprint monitoring began. The monitoring helped with people attempting to ‘escape’ from their houses. They also had a stronger restriction effect than that of ‘voluntary quarantine’, which counts on pure conscious, as seen in many Western countries.
CDC and the Government have called this type of measure the ‘Digital/Electronic Fencing’, injecting confidence in its accuracy and reliability in public. Unfortunately, while some sounded the alarm on issues surrounding User Privacy and Human Rights, the majority of Taiwanese people were reluctant to question the Government’s measure, given its high efficiency.
Interestingly enough, the website that touches on ‘Digital Fencing’ for enforcement on quarantines has drastically different version on the ‘English’ translation of the site. Whereas the actual user agreement every passenger signs states:
Please record your body temperature and health status, and cooperate with caring and tracking measures (including using Taiwan’s cell phone signals to implement electronic monitoring of your location; such personal data will continue to be used until the expiration of self-health management period and will be destroyed 28 days after the end of that period).
Electronic monitoring is a broad term, but it didn’t end there. After reassuring the benefits of digitally tracking footprint through mobile use, the CDC has expanded the use to general public. The CDC utilized the already existing infrastructure to launch ‘cellular broadcast’ (細胞簡訊/廣播) as key contact tracing measure. This version of contact tracing combined with assertive policy and fear-driven media campaigns, resulted in over 20k spending the Lunar New Year in isolation. For people who were notified by texts that they had overlapping footprints with COVID positive cases, they were immediately escorted to designated locations, having to leave their homes and family behind.
Digital User Experience: Why Would They Care?
Before heading to the destination, Taiwan, all passengers were requested to do visit the website below and fill out personal information. It looks like this:
Needless to say, all fields on the web form is required and all passengers need a successful submission. Regardless of what technical difficulties they might face along the way. Users have no experience with technologies also had trouble working through the form. As a result, many ground workers and front-line medical staff needed to standby and resolve these difficulties one-on-one. Sounds like customer support when you would like to return an Amazon package or request a refund on UberEats? This is exactly like that, but with each corner case or UIUX failure results in immediate human intervention, posing additional risks that should have been avoided.
Passengers who arrived at the terminal quickly discovered that behind the scenes of a calm, collected, tech-driven response is a labor-intensive chaos. The CDC mandated for every flight landed, all the passengers needed to wait at the gate for their individual PCR result. While many long-haul flight passengers were eager to find a restful break, they were asked to re-fill the form or constantly interrupted by the health staff announcements. For each high volume, international flight, there could be around 10 to 20 medical staff to collect PCR samples, announce results, all while juggling between each passenger’s specific questions on how to fill out the quarantine declaration.
Another de-humanizing aspect is that the ground staff treat every single passenger as if they have already been infected. There were 4–5police officers and security personnels accompanying every group testing after each flight, who did nothing but monitored the testing process. The tensions were high. Securities stood by, ready for rioting to take place. Names announced, and as soon as the person is confirmed COVID-positive, they went from being ‘human’ to ‘cases.’
Tools To Instill Fear: Rituals, Dashboards & 2 p.m. Press Conference
There have been discussions ever since the first COVID — 19 dashboard implemented by Johns Hopkins was released. Since then, the dashboard have provided key information, such as total cases, total deaths, recovered cases, and vaccination rates across the globe. Google has also provided visualization through the NYTimes.
The CDC in Taiwan put 2 home-grown and customized visuals on its frontpage.
Two things —
1. While Google/NYTimes and JHU have adjusted their layouts and design of the dashboard to respect the individual lives taken by this disease (see below), the 2 dashboards shown here still adopts an alerting color scheme to highlight the deaths and infected.
2. The vaccination rate is a key indicator on how severe the infection will evolve, pointing at potential growth and recovery speed. These dashboards have little value to the users — how should one feel? Should one feel worried based on the cumulated cases? Displaying only cumulative cases could be dangerous in such way, due to Negative Bias.
The ritual of national watch party at 2pm became a phenomenon. The CDC Director Dr. Chen shows up on the screen and display visual props, indicating how serious the infection rate is or how concerned people should be.
The purpose of calling daily Press Conference is ambiguous, and arguably distorted, when it only feeds to anxiety and fear inducing media campaigns.
Moving Forward
The world is moving forward, with the awareness the disease and infections will continue. The discourses have changed. Most U.S. states no longer require mask-wearing practices. A recent ruling overturned mask mandates on airlines. Taiwan is just now experiencing its first community outbreak, putting its 7-day average cases at 2k.
Significant changes took place between the initial ‘Taiwan Can Help’ ad and the recent outbreak. Indeed, the digital monitoring and mandatory quarantines gained success and support by the public, at the expense of undermined privacy and freedom of the minorities. Yet, will the digital facade sustain itself, given the reality of lack of infrastructure and labor intensive procedure persists? Will Taiwan’s discourse on digital public health change when the rest of the world is moving forward? The only assurance is that certainly those will not be broadcasted on national television at 2 p.m. everyday.
