Taiwan used police surveillance, government tracking, and $33,000 fines to contain its coronavirus outbreak
- Taiwan has largely kept its coronavirus outbreak under control, with only around 440 confirmed cases and seven deaths.
- But critics say the success have come at the expense of its citizens' privacy.
- To curb the spread of the virus, the Taiwanese government instituted a tracking program and regular police check-ins with known carriers.
While some governments around the world have struggled to contain the coronavirus, Taiwan has kept its outbreak under control.
But some of the tactics the Taiwanese government has used to curb the spread, including frequent police visits and the tracking of quarantined residents, have raised questions over privacy and excessive surveillance.
Located just 80 miles from mainland China, where the outbreak began, Taiwan been wildly successful at containing the virus, reporting a total of 443 cases and seven deaths. As of June 3, Taiwan has reported only three new cases in three weeks.
And it achieved that without the type of total shutdown other countries have implemented. Businesses on the island have remained open, residents continue to move freely through the streets, and its professional baseball season is in full swing — albeit with a reduced crowd.
But some say Taiwan is using excessive surveillance to curb the spread.
Critics have pushed back on the government's methods of containing the virus, which some say have made the territory a surveillance state.
By mid-March, all foreign visitors had been banned and all new entrants to the island had to enter mandatory 14-day self-isolation — or risk a $33,000 fine.
That meant that when universities around the world closed their doors, an influx of Taiwanese students studying abroad returned home and were immediately put into mandatory quarantine.
One of these students, Owen Lin, said authorities checked in on him multiple times a day to make sure he was staying inside.
"Every morning they'll have the person who is in charge of your district call you and ask you, 'Oh, hi, are you having fevers?' Or 'Do you have any symptoms from the COVID-19?'" he told Business Insider Today.
He said the government's center for disease control also regularly texts known carriers of the virus to check on their health.
"They ask you, 'Do you have any symptoms? Reply 1 or reply 2 if you have symptoms,'" he said.
If someone in quarantine fails to answer a check-in call or text, he said, chances are the police will be at their door in under an hour.
"A lot of policemen, especially from the local government, they found out that it's not the people that are violating the law, the regulation — it's because their phone died or because of bad signal," he said.
In addition to check-in calls, the government worked with telecommunications companies to track quarantined residents' locations using their phone numbers.
This system, called a "digital fence," notifies authorities when anyone under mandatory quarantine goes outside their designated quarantine site.
The island also learned hard lessons from combating SARS in 2003, like the need to act quickly. As early as December, nearly a month before the World Health Organization confirmed the virus could spread between humans, Taiwan began screening and quarantining symptomatic travelers from regions with confirmed cases of COVID-19.
On January 20, Taiwan activated its Central Epidemic Command Center, which holds daily press briefings explaining each of the government's pandemic response measures to the public.
The government invested $6.6 million in domestic mask production in late January, disregarding WHO guidance that masks only be worn by healthcare workers and sick people. Taiwan also banned mask exports and implemented a rationing system to prevent hoarding.
And Taiwan had some built-in advantages before the pandemic began, such as widespread access to affordable healthcare and an existing cultural practice of wearing masks for public health.
Still, most Taiwanese are happy with the government's pandemic response.
Most Taiwanese people are happy with the government's pandemic response — it received an average score of 84 out of 100 in a recent survey.
For Lin, the student, sharing his location data is simply part of helping the government fight the pandemic.
"We're able to make a small sacrifice that we can continue to have a normal life," he said.
But to privacy advocates like Schee, expensive fines would have been sufficient to keep residents in quarantine.
"You don't really have to go through the detail of introducing more, you know, draconian measures," he said. "In the end, it's the huge fine that scared people away."
Schee estimates that about 100,000 people are being tracked in the digital fence system. Many more residents — more than 600,000 — had their location data collected for contact tracing, which identifies everyone who came into contact COVID-19-positive patients.
As a result, Taiwanese authorities had highly accurate estimates of how many residents had been exposed to the virus, without widespread testing.
Taiwan's success in controlling the virus has stirred controversy internationally.
Because the World Health Organization considers Taiwan a province of China, and not an independent nation, Taiwan was not represented at an emergency meeting in January where member nations shared their planned containment strategies.
For the same reason, the World Health Organization includes Taiwan's infection and death data within China's totals on its widely cited Coronavirus Dashboard.
Taiwanese officials say this creates confusion about the state of the pandemic in Taiwan and causes nations around the world to classify Taiwanese travelers as high-risk, despite the island's low number of infections.
Some believe the success of Taiwan's response methods mean it will be some time before residents push back against surveillance, Brian Hioe, editor of the Taiwanese political magazine New Bloom, told Business Insider Today.
"It probably will have to wait until after COVID-19 passes for there to be any political willpower to do so," he said.