intl-tel-input field change trigger in cases where there is no country code?

I have a field in a modal where the value gets changed dynamically, that bypasses the initialization and the typing updates to the field by intl-tel-input.

Using setNumber on the field works as long as the number contains the country code, but keeps the previous country if a number without one is set (as opposed to going back to no country default).

There was also a problem where setNumber added a 0 at the start of the number, but turning off nationalMode as mentioned here seems to have worked.

Just trying to get step 1 working where it would get some number and show what it needs to based on that number. Does that mean I’d need to reinitialize the field every time the modal is opened?

// initialization
const telInputEl = document.querySelector("#tel");
const telInput = window.intlTelInput(telInputEl, {
    countryOrder: ["ee", "fi", "se", "no", "dk", "de", "gb"],
    countrySearch: false,
    utilsScript: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/build/js/utils.js",
    //separateDialCode: true,
    nationalMode: false,
});

// trying to change it later
$('#tel').val( $(row).data('tel') );
telInput.setNumber( String($(row).data('tel')) );