in 2020 the world went into lockdown in Wuhan, central China a new coronavirus

had emerged the disease was named Covid19

can be characterized as a pandemic as of mid-december 2020 the novel

coronavirus spread to more than 180 countries

infected more than 71 million people and killed more than 1.6 million

most governments around the world were at a loss for how to contain the

infection and ordered everyone to just stay home

while much of the world was at a standstill in taiwan

international marathons and parades were taking place

people were able to go to school and work

it was pretty much life as usual from mid-april to the end of 2020 there

were zero local cases of covet 19. the secret

is in taiwan's public health system grace liao is a veteran news presenter

who knows key decision makers

and alan leanne a medical doctor and public health expert

they're on a mission to uncover taiwan's secrets

they will uncover and share how taiwan has been able to emerge as a global

leader in beating covet 19.

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like all biological organisms viruses strive to climb to the top of the food

chain in 2019 a new virus emerged

from the coronavirus family it was named coronavirus

ii the name of the disease covet 19.

its organ of choice the lungs it first burst onto the scene

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that it is a new disease a disease that this world has not seen before

2020 was a year defined by the virus three months was all it took to spread

all over the map terrorizing and making headlines around

the world but taiwan also made news around the

world for beating it the covet 19 crisis

has reminded us all that taiwan has a great deal to be proud of on the world

stage

zero community infections since april 12th

seven deaths total

my name is grace leo i'm a journalist to find out how border control is fighting

the battle i have invited adam lang a former

medical officer at taiwan centers for disease control to join me

in investigating what goes on here at taiwan's first line of defense

this is taiwan's taoio international airport the entry port to taiwan

there are direct flights from muhan china every day the trip is merely two

and a half hour allen meets jolene luo a registered

nurse and cdc quarantine officer on the battlefront

have the dangerous job of interviewing passengers arriving in taiwan

already showing symptoms of covet 19.

[Music] gloves masks goggles gowns

everyone covers as much of themselves as possible to prevent getting infected in

case any of these passengers are carriers of the highly contagious

disease

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foreign [Music]

anyone arriving in taiwan feeling unwell receives a test

right away

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talks with frontline medical teams grace liao a journalist with 30 years of

experience meets with chen zhong yen deputy

director of the central epidemic command center

to see how coronavirus testing is conducted at the airport

certainly

foreign

foreign [Music]

[Music] the test result for one of the

passengers came back positive and the person was immediately taken to

a hospital [Music]

uh

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before passengers even land in taiwan epidemic control measures are already in

place for passengers to let the cdc know that they've arrived

this is the first firewall to shut out the virus

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before you even board onto the plan you have to go to the website of ministry of

health and welfare filled up forms that tells the

government where you have been to what symptoms you have over the past weeks

and where you're gonna be home calling things after you're right

checking in with the cdc is as simple as scanning the code

and tapping the green button people who don't have a working cell phone in

taiwan can rent one for 14 days of quarantine

for 60 new taiwan dollars or just over 2 us dollars a day

when kobe 19 started to spread in ouhan it was the worst timing for us

it was a lunar new year when people travel home for holidays

when taiwanese businessmen and their families will return to taiwan

at that time taiwan was possibly the area most at risk of an epidemic

outside of mainland china but taiwan was able to prevent kobe 19 from

taking over the island surprising the world

the odds were against taiwan both in terms of timing and due to its exclusion

from the world's foremost public health body

they were not receiving information from you know official

multilateral sources and so they were left to their own devices

then they detected that there was some social media flurry that was going on

in wuhan last december 31st and we found that it is an emerging

and unexpected danger situation so we sent email to world health

organization and china cdc on the same day we already

started our border control for all this and

direct inbound passengers from wuhan

how was the government able to set up efficient safeguards against the virus

so quickly so early on grace talks to president

if you successfully pass this checkpoint welcome to taiwan

this is really one of the world's most secure airports

not by police power but by epidemic prevention power

next when kova does get past the tightest epidemic airport security

measures in the world what happens a taxi driver gets infected

by a passenger who had just returned from china

and spreads it to his family causing the first community outbreak in taiwan

epidemic investigators scrambled to find out where the virus came from

and how to contain the outbreak the bubonic plague smallpox influenza

and now covid disease has been man's number one killer throughout history

killing millions and wiping out massive portions of the population at a time

in the 1800s there was an outbreak of cholera

the field of epidemiology and public health arose

partly to investigate how the disease spreads

human beings have been fighting disease since before history was recorded

but grace liao and alan lien are finding that public health as a field of study

has been around for less than 200 years ever since then humans have been

struggling to catch up with diseases in less than 100 days it had made its

way to every single continent except antarctica

no virus has ever traveled so quickly january 2020 in central taiwan over the

lunar new year holiday a taxi driver thought he might have

caught a cold

wonderland

the symptoms got worse and he was rushed to the hospital emergency

room where he was tested for covet-19

test results came back the day he died showing that he was positive for the

virus family members were heartbroken over the

loss of their loved one but their ordeal was only just beginning

they also tested positive taiwan was in danger of

a major outbreak before all the border control measures

were in place the virus had crept in claiming its first victim and causing

the first community infection in the country

but who gave the virus to the taxi driver

and who else could have been infected this is a cdc medical officer

and an old colleague of allen liens he updates alan on what the job now

requires and how he traced the driver's contacts

authorities quickly opened an investigation to uncover

and contain the outbreak in central taiwan

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to facilitate contact tracing police provided phone records of the driver

and the team cross-referenced calls made from near the airport and hotels

with medical records from the national health insurance administration

by 4 pm that day they had narrowed their search down to

3 people any one of whom could have been patient zero

xuja bing creates a timeline looking at the driver's 14-day incubation period

on january 22nd the driver had been to the airport to pick up a man returning

from china and this man's health insurance data

shows several visits to the doctor [Music]

oh

the results came back negative

grace asks a leading expert on infectious diseases

also the chairman of the cecc expert consultation committee

why

all the missing pieces were found outbreak contained

epidemic investigation case closed it seemed kovat 19 had met a dead end

but it quickly found an even better strategy

the trojan horse next a cruise liner of more than 3 000

vacationers potentially infected with the new coronavirus

lands in taiwan no one knew about the infections

until after they'd been all over taipei the border controls had been breached

once again putting taiwan's contact tracing to the

test on a much larger scale this time taiwan has to

resort to technology and big data to pinpoint potentially

infected people and avoid a lockdown

the new virus that causes covet 19 is from the coronavirus family

corona is latin for crown which despite proteins on the virus resembled

food

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wherever people are in close contact the virus spreads fast

in 14 days sars kovi ii infected one-fifth of all the passengers on the

diamond princess cruise ship my joshua and his father were on the

disease-stricken cruise liner and recalled the horror

oh yeah sure how this is the whole joke is you're the my

mother cause oh yeah

warren teamed off the port of yokohama in japan

this was the diamond princess in february when it was confirmed that a

passenger who had got off the ship in hong kong

tested positive for covet 19. [Music]

more than 3 000 people were ordered to stay in their cabins

no one could leave the ship 2019

among the more than 700 passengers who contracted the virus before being taken

to hospitals in japan but before the ship became a diseased

vessel that port authorities refused docking permission

it had made a stop in taiwan where more than three thousand passengers and crew

got off to explore taipei

santiago

foreign

the virus played the oldest trick in the book the trojan horse

and taiwan countered by using big data technology

grace heads to the executive yuan's department of cyber security

to find out how the strategy worked and how contact tracing for thousands of

people at a time was carried out using cell phone signals

cross referencing cell phone signals originating on the diamond princess's

path of travel during its time in taiwan they were able to narrow down the search

to about 3 000 numbers the cell phone signals were then back

traced data experts found more than 30 places where the vacationers stayed for

more than half an hour and cross preference that with local

cell phone number signals that stayed for more than five minutes

within a 500 meter radius to find people that could have been

exposed [Music]

to science

[Music] if any of the and twenty thousand people

became ill and went to see a doctor in the

following weeks since potential contact with the diamond princess passengers

they would be automatically flagged by the system

tomorrow

head of the cyber security department and a physician trained in public health

in may he co-authored a paper published in the journal of medical internet

research on how taiwan used big data analytics to

prevent a massive community outbreak [Music]

look at how contact tracing can track down people

i'm here to find out if big data and ai can track down virus too

this is a phylogenetic tree of all known cases of sars cov2

with genetic sequencing it traces the ancestry and mutations of the virus

to help speed up the search for better treatments

at this artificial intelligence lab machine learning is also applied to the

diagnosis of covid19 chest x-rays were given to the ai system

to learn what pneumonia looks like this is an x-ray of a sick patient

pneumonia

has

with a virus that mutates so quickly it's a race against time

if machine learning can help accelerate the speed at which humans respond for

diagnosis and treatment the war may tilt in our favor but the

battle fire is still raging and people are returning

to taiwan infected with the new coronavirus next

a young woman with covet 19 comes back from spain

she has treated at a busy hospital for more than a month

could the virus have found another opportunity to cause an outbreak