Just before midnight on Monday, an airplane carrying 247 Taiwanese evacuees from Wuhan, China, landed at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport. From there they were taken to designated quarantine facilities around the nation.
The approximate whereabouts of the quarantine stations was made public, but their exact locations were not. The secrecy was deemed appropriate to prevent spread of the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Taiwan.
The government’s response to situations such as this are addressed in the Communicable Disease Control Act (傳染病防治法), in which outbreaks, such as the SARS epidemic or the 2019-nCoV outbreak, are designated as category 1 communicable diseases. The law puts the coordination of the response fully in the hands of the central government in the interest of avoiding confusion or duplicating resource allocation.
Keeping private the exact location of the quarantine facilities is important to ensure that local residents do not panic or protest; that a media circus around the information is avoided; that the evacuees are not publicly identified and demonized; and that impediments to the national response to pre-empt a potential outbreak are contained to a minimum.
This is why Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) revelation on Sunday evening of the location of one of the quarantine sites in northern Taiwan caused such an uproar.
When asked about why he had disclosed the location, Ko refused to admit that he had spoken out of turn. Instead, he said that transparency is important in a democratic society, and that Beijing’s decision to withhold information from the Chinese public and the international community had contributed to the scale of the outbreak in China in the first place.
Those points appear to have some merit, until they are subjected to even the briefest of scrutiny. Ko’s comments were immediately met with a backlash from the public and from certain politicians, angered not only by his slip, but also by his apparent disregard for the implications of his words.
Meanwhile, as the Chinese Culture University is near the disclosed quarantine facility, the school’s student association issued a statement expressing serious concern, a move that reiterated the need to keep such information under wraps.
There is no point in debating the appropriate times for temporarily withholding information from the public or exploring the value of Ko’s ostensible reasons. He is an intelligent man, and as a physician, he would have his own insight into the potential repercussions of not maintaining confidentiality. The truth is, he opened his mouth a little too wide and grasped for a plausible-sounding excuse when criticized.
Ko’s political star is in the ascendant, especially after the success of his Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in January’s legislative elections. His second term as mayor ends in 2022, leaving the option of a presidential run in 2024.
If he aspires to the highest office in Taiwan, he might want to be more guarded in what he says and when he says it, and not rely on transparent excuses delivered with flippant disregard for the consequences.
Perhaps more worrying was his response when asked whether the government would discipline him; he asked whether he should worry about being locked up.
Ko knows full well that it is the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and not the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that likely stands between him and the presidency. The comment about being locked up has the definite ring of an appeal to unfounded and offensive tropes about the DPP presiding over a “green terror.”
Ko needs to guard his mouth and up his game if he wants the TPP to function as a viable, constructive third force in national politics.
In the meantime, he should assist, not impede, the government’s response to the outbreak in China.
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