With direct flights to Wuhan and a populace of 24 million humans dwelling in densely packed cities, Taiwan's coronavirus outlook appeared grave.
But, to date, the ailment has claimed simply seven lives on the island, and it by no means went into full lockdown.
Its leaders savings masks as taking part in a key role, however now not for the motives you may suppose.
"Masks are some thing that, first, reminds you to wash your fingers right and, second, protects you from touching your mouth - that is the most important gain to the man or woman who wears it," explains Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister.
Taiwan's residents have worn face masks for fitness and different motives seeing that the 1950s, however the unfold of coronavirus induced a spate of panic-buying.
To even out demand, the masks had to be rationed whilst manufacturing was once ramped up, from two million to 20 million objects a day.
Long queues snaked returned from pharmacies and different stores - which posed a hazard of contagion in themselves. So, the authorities determined facts about every location's inventory degrees have to be made publicly available.
To do so, Ms Tang's ministry launched a platform which every seller may want to maintain up to date with their inventory numbers.
Then, Taiwan's hacking community, with whom the authorities had been constructing a sturdy relationship for years, stepped in.
It started out drawing on the data, which had been made public, to construct a collection of real-time 'mask maps'.
These furnished residents with updated statistics on the place they should discover masks shut to their properties or work, with small print of how many have been accessible to buy.
Mutual trust
As the maps grew in popularity, greater hacking groups joined in and introduced aspects like voice-control for customers with visible impairments.
More than 10 million humans have used the masks apps.
The result, says Ms Tang, is that these days solely a minority do now not put on them, and even they now "feel social pressure" to do so.
"This is the first time hackers have certainly felt that they are like the designers of civil engineering projects," she adds.
"Because we have confidence the human beings a lot, once in a while the human beings have faith back."
The relationship between Taiwan's authorities and the universal populace wasn't continually so smooth.
There had been recriminations following 2003's extreme acute respiratory syndrome epidemic (Sars), when the response was once "very chaotic", says Ms Tang.
Part of the hassle used to be that the authorities failed to create a centralised physique to coordinate its response.
Leaders discovered the lesson, and in 2004 installed the National Health Command Centre to make sure that, in future crises, authorities organizations would work higher together. They additionally ordered stockpiles of private defensive tools (PPE) to be saved at a stage that would be enough to deal with the early stage of any future pandemic.
In 2014, there was once extra civil strife when residents stormed the parliament constructing to protest towards a exchange settlement which many felt added Taiwan too shut to China. Most of all they objected to how they hadn't been listened to by using these in power.
The match grew to be recognised as the Sunflower Revolution due to the fact protesters used the flower as a image of hope.
Among their variety have been a band of civil hackers, who collaborated on packages that used reachable statistics to resolve challenges dealing with society.
The authorities in consequence invited them to locate approaches to crowdsource and analyse citizens' views and insights, to higher have an effect on the advent of new laws.
Ms Tang - herself a civic hacker at the time - suggests that Taiwan's authorities was once rapid to counter the hazard of the coronavirus, in part, due to the fact past crises had taught it the price of being extra responsive.
So when a 'netizen' re-posted to Taiwan's equal of Reddit a warning from Wuhan of a Sars-like illness, in the early hours at the stop of December, people upvoted it - and the authorities paid attention.
That message grew to become out to be from Dr Li Wenliang, the Chinese whistleblower who first alerted the world to Covid-19.
Soon after, focused sections of the populace had been examined and traced if they had simply lower back from Wuhan and lately skilled any fitness issues. It labored - and the virus used to be stopped in its tracks.
Meme v misinformation
There are different motives why Taiwan has been in a position to suppress Covid-19.
Earlier this week, Chien-Jen Chen - the island's former vice-president and a famend epidemiologist - informed British MPs that a well-designed contact tracing machine and the software of strict quarantine guidelines to inbound site visitors had additionally performed a predominant role.
But he too stated the nature of the island's "hyper-democracy" - and the efforts its fitness chiefs had made to obtain the public's believe - have been the key elements in it success.
Those in energy are not simply responsive to the voices of citizens, however additionally the memes and different messages they share.
It helped the authorities counter false claims that the fabric used to make masks was once the identical as that discovered in loo paper. In response Taiwan's Premier posted a self-mocking cartoon, which confirmed his backside wiggling, alongside an rationalization of the specific sources that lavatory paper and masks paper come from.
"It went truely viral" says Ms Tang, of the authorities approach referred to as "humour over rumour".
The approach uses catchy tweet-length posts, which are designed to unfold extra shortly than misinformation.
"The probabilities are that most humans will see... the clarification message earlier than the rumour," explains Ms Tang.
"Then they will have herd immunity - or, in the case of a meme, nerd immunity," she jokes.
At a time when have confidence in the authorities is turning into frayed elsewhere, Ms Tang suggests Taiwan illustrates there is an choice to a top-down approach, must a 2nd wave of the virus hit.
But "that choice need to be made by means of the complete society", she adds.
