Coronavirus: Taiwan offers us a quarantine masterclass
How Taiwan’s quarantine system kept Covid out — without abandoning its citizens overseas.
There are more than 44,000 reasons why Covid quarantine in Taiwan is better than in Australia.
The food was tastier. The view was better. The window opened.
But the real triumph of Taiwan’s quarantine system is that it has not stranded more than 44,000 of its citizens overseas.
That is how many Australians are registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the highest level on record.
“All citizens, if they want to come back to Taiwan, they are welcome,” Taiwan’s former vice-president Chen Chien-jen tells me over Webex on my second-last day of quarantine in Taipei.
“No limitations,” says Dr Chen, who is now a senior fellow at the Genomics Research Centre at Taipei’s Academia Sinica.
It has been that way throughout the pandemic in Taiwan, which on Sunday reported two domestic cases of Covid.
Not so in Australia, a fellow island democracy of about 25 million people. The main hurdle is the measly 3000 places a week in Australia’s quarantine network.
That problem has just got worse after the trans-Tasman travel bubble burst. Thousands more Australians have been asked to join the queue and wait for a spot in an already overstretched system.
How they did it
A remarkable feature of Taiwan’s hotel quarantine system is how recently it was made compulsory.
From March 28, 2020, all arrivals to Australia had to quarantine for 14 days in a government-run hotel.
In Taiwan, hotel quarantine was made compulsory only on June 27. Delta forced the change.
The compliance of Taiwanese allowed their government to trust them to quarantine at home. They understood why it was needed.
“We have this kind of lesson from the SARS outbreak in 2003,” says Dr Chen, who was a key member in the Tsai government as it navigated the first five months of the pandemic.
The Taiwanese government also innovated to make it work.
As the cases were spreading in Wuhan in January 2020, President Tsai Ing-wen called a meeting of her national security council.
“Hey, CJ, do you have any kind of suggestions?” she asked, recalls Dr Chen, who trained as an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University and was Taiwan’s health minister during the 2003 SARS outbreak.
Quarantining close contacts worked well during SARS. Maybe, he suggested, they could make it even better using mobile phones.
Within weeks, Taiwan had pioneered a “digital fencing system”. It allowed the government to monitor a quarantiner’s location by turning their mobile phone into a tracking device.
The government helped with meal deliveries, garbage disposal and healthcare.
Compliance levels were about 99.7 per cent, boosted by hefty fines for breaches.
“You have to have carrots – and also the stick,” says Dr Chen.
The first five months of Australia’s hotel system quarantined 96,000 international arrivals.
Towards 170,000 Taiwanese – almost twice as many – returned home during the same period, most to their homes.
Right now, Taiwan is quarantining almost three times as many international arrivals as is Australia.
Where are the police?
The Taiwanese quarantine hotel system is run by hoteliers.
My wife, Rosaline, and I did not see a single police officer, or member of the army, during our fortnight at Tapei’s Home Hotel.
“[In Taiwan] people are quite good at complying with government regulation,” says Dr Chen.
Australians, apparently, need to see a bit of khaki to follow the rules.
Uniformed army and navy personnel still load the bags on to the buses that take arrivals in Australia to their hotel.
The police still oversee the whole operation.
Security guards are stationed on most floors of Australia’s quarantine hotels, which has been a useful way for the virus to enter urban populations around the country.
At Taipei’s Home Hotel, not only was there no security guard on my floor but there didn’t seem to be any in the building.
Most Taiwanese are able to choose which hotel they will stay at. There are different hotels, offering different services, at different prices.
The Australian government, by contrast, chooses where its returning citizens will quarantine.
However, the choice is taken away for those arriving in Taiwan from what the Ministry of Health labels a “key high-risk country”.
If you come via Brazil, the United Kingdom, India, Peru, Israel, Indonesia, Bangladesh or Myanmar, no hotel for you.
You are off to “Centralised Quarantine Station”.
That also began on June 27, as the number of Delta cases in the CBD-based hotel network worried the government.
The quarantine stations are located further from Taiwan’s main cities. They are repurposed dormitories or other public buildings.
The experience is much more quarantine, less hotel. The Taiwanese government foots the entire bill.
Squirt of disinfectant
Couples are separated in Taiwanese hotel quarantine. There is also much more concern about surface spread.
As you wait for your taxi, a man armed with disinfectant sprays your bags, your clothes and your shoes.
When you arrive in the basement entrance of your hotel, a person in head-to-toe PPE gives you a pair of plastic shoe covers.
For safe measure, your bags also get another squirt or two of disinfectant.
Taiwan requires a negative test within 72 hours of boarding and another on arrival at the airport. You then give yourself a self-administered test 10 days after check-in.
I got a Winnie-the-Pooh sticker after mine, although I am not sure if that is uniform across the system. I do know it would never happen in mainland China, where Winnie is banned because of his resemblance to President Xi Jinping.
On day 12, you get a final test. That takes place outside on a specially outfitted, well-ventilated bus that parks in front of your hotel. My test excursion lasted 9nine minutes.
Taiwan also asks that in your third week, you practise something pretty close to quarantine.
You can go out for a walk, or to exercise, or to buy groceries, but they ask you not to eat in restaurants or catch up with people – just in case.
Even in Taiwan, people find innovative ways to undermine the system.
This weekend, a pilot on the Taiwanese airline EVA was fired for a speculator breach of self-managed quarantine after a long-haul flight to the US.
He went out for meals with friends, which he wasn’t meant to do.
“In addition, despite developing symptoms on August 28, the pilot disregarded them and falsified his preflight health declaration form to co-pilot a cargo flight to Brisbane on August 30,” the airline said.
He was tested while in Brisbane and after flying home was found to be positive with the Delta strand. So was his co-pilot.
Taiwan’s has now tightened quarantine rules for pilots.
More than one million people at the weekend were sent alerts on their mobile phones warning them that they may have been at exposure locations.
The tinkering never ends.
Attacks on Jews at record levels
Australia’s Jewish community has suffered its most traumatic year since records were first kept, with more than 1800 anti-Semitic incidents reported across the country, a staggering 324 per cent increase on the previous year.
Albanese government accused of abandoning Israel
Labor stands accused of abandoning Israel in a historic betrayal of Jews, the national interest and the ALP’s best traditions, in an anguished intervention from two prominent Jewish leaders: Mark Leibler and Josh Frydenberg.