Spot the non-mask wearer in the crowd...
Do these fellas look like they care about their health to you?
Today sees the official easing of anti-Wuhan coronavirus social distancing measures in Hong Kong that includes the number of people allowed to gather in public going up to four (from the previous two) and restaurants being permitted to seat four people per table (from two previously). Also, more businesses will be allowed to reopen, including mahjong parlours and games arcades -- but those bars without restaurant licenses, karaoke lounges, party rooms and saunas are to stay closed for the time being.
Word is that all bars (with or without restaurant licenses) will be allowed to open from next Friday (September 18th). This can't come soon enough for those establishments which have been closed for some two months now and worry that they may not survive another month without reopening their doors. And these anxieties may have got the better of catering sector lawmaker Tommy Cheung, whose stated suggestion yesterday that government doctors did not know how to make risk assessments amid the pandemic have been criticized by some as putting undue pressure on civil servants and underlying their morale!
To be sure, I don't want to be on the side of the man who has said that bar customers can put on masks after every sip of beer that they take; this not least since, as Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan (the Centre of Health Protection's Communicable Disease Branch head) has pointed out, it's actually riskier to put on and take off masks repeatedly over a short period of time than to not wear one at all. But I must admit to finding the matter of which bars have been allowed to open versus which have not rather strange because some bars I've eaten food at turn out to not have restaurant licenses (and therefore have not been allowed to open) whereas some bars I know that people tend to go to drink far more than eat have been allowed to open (because, for some reason, they operate under restaurant rather than bar licenses)!
On a related note: the impression I get is that many of the bars that don't have restaurant licenses tend to be smaller and quieter than many bars with restaurant licenses. And as it so happens, the larger establishments also tend to be the ones which are really heaving on Fridays and Saturday nights -- and thus, to my mind, more likely places for people to be infected by the Wuhan coronavirus!
In short, when one looks closely at the social distancing measures, quite a few illogical decisions come to light. And the lack of logic -- and justice -- is even more obvious when we look at the implementation -- or not, as the case may be -- of these social distancing measures (and the penalizing of people who are judged to have not complied with them).
As an example, despite people being required to wear masks in Hong Kong in pretty much every setting since late July, I still tend to see at least one person without a mask on whenever I am out for any significant amount of time on the streets and urban parks. Victoria Park, in particular, seems to be a space where a number of people feel at liberty to remove their masks; this even though people are officially exempted from wearing masks in country but not urban parks and many of the people without masks on are actually just sitting on park benches or leisurely strolling around rather than involved in any kind of really strenous exercise that would officially exempt from mask-wearing!
Yet only once have I seen any of those errant non-mask wearers getting ticketed for their sins -- and that was earlier this week. And while I've seen pictures and read reports of pro-democracy protestors and foreign domestic helpers on their days off being harassed by the police for standing or sitting too close to one another, I've again seen plenty of folks gathering in larger numbers than is supposedly allowed without any fear or threat that any actual action would be taken against them!
What stops me from getting seriously aggravated about seeing people casually flouting the anti-Wuhan coroanvirus social distancing regulations is that Hong Kong's daily new case numbers are back to the low double digits or even at single digits in recent weeks. For example, we had 12 new cases reported today (and 0 added fatalities) and 12 new cases yesterday too.
And that "universal" testing that the government's been pushing really hard for some time now (and which? It's been further extended to Monday, September 14th (i.e., for one more week than originally planned), yet they've no hope of reaching the 4-5 million number they had estimated/hoped would be the case. Something else worth noting: after having tested more than 1.6 million people, they've thus far only had 23 positive results! (So yeah, I think many would agree that the University of Hong Kong's Centre for Infection head, Dr Ho Pak-leung, was pretty spot on when he said this scheme would see the government "wasting bullets" back on August 21st!)
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