Hong Kong Covid horror stories

 

How bad a state is Hong Kong currently in?  Well, when you

consider that entry to places of worship are currently off limits... :S

 

Two evenings ago, Hong Kong was abuzz about an emergency alert about Queen Elizabeth Hospital being converted into a designated Covid hospital having been sent on a previously unknown -- and unused --  HK$150 million system to many (but not all) phone owners that caused their phones' sirens and buzzers to go off like nobody's business.  Freaked out folks variously wondered if an earthquake had occurred or if Russia had declared a nuclear war.  

 

Others wondered if martial law had been declared in Hong Kong or they had been summoned to be admitted to one of those horrible "community isolation facilities" that have been built (overly) quickly in recent weeks.  All in all, it's a wonder that no one actually got a heart attack as a result of hearing the alert, though several people did voice that it threatened to do so for them!   

 

Two days later, Queen Elizabeth Hospital is in the news once more -- and this time, we're talking about something truly tragic that can in no way be taken lightly or turned into a joke that we can all laugh off.  Specifically: photographs circulated on social media showing filled body bags having been put in a hospital ward right next to patients and their beds (those poor patients!), and, in one image, a bag of adult diapers having been placed atop a filled body bag. 

Granted that we know that Hong Kong's public hospitals have been under severe strain -- no thanks to the private hospitals not pitching in much at all.  Just today, there was a report in the Hong Kong Free Press that "over 12,500 of the Hospital Authority's (HA) 88,000 employees have been infected with Covid-19 during the fifth wave, as it continues to overwhelm the public healthcare system" and about a viral video showing Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s Accident and Emergency Department's consultant doctor, Ho Hiu-fai, a veteran medico who's worked at the hospital for 35 years, breaking down in tears during a staff meeting.

 

Truly, the picture painted by Dr Ho at the staff meeting was horrendous.  Among the details: some 80 percent of patients who arrived at the hospital by ambulance had Covid and some 65 percent of them required hospitalization.  Also, "some patients failed to be admitted into wards and were stuck in the emergency room".  And the reports of other staffers at the meeting were alarming too: including about the emergency room "being like hell, where patients have to sleep on the floor, and there is not enough medicine and supplies like saline water and oxygen"; and there also being "not enough manpower to take care of elderly people's needs, such as taking them to the toilet and feeding them." 

 

Even so, nothing quite rammed home how terrible things have become like those shocking photos.  You know it's bad when a public health professor's Tweeted reaction to the most circulated of them was: "It takes a lot, and this far into the pandemic, but this photo has brought me to an all-time low point." And in the words of another person upset by what they saw: "What two years of Hong Kong government incompetence, and Central government interference, has done to Asia's World City."

 

The Hong Kong Hospital Authority has urged for understanding -- and I think many people will give them -- or at least its medical staffers -- that.  People know that they are overwhelmed and that they've been hung out to dry by the Hong Kong government.  But the Hong Kong government itself really has a lot to answer for.  

 

Oh, and for the record: Hong Kong reported another 294 Covid deaths today; bringing the total number of fifth wave deaths to 3,231 to date.  (A reminder: until the fifth wave, Hong Kong had considerably fewer Covid deaths than deaths from SARS in 2003.)  As Hong Kong-based history professor Noah Shusterman put it: "No excuse for this, not now, not in 2022."     

 

Adding to the horror: the mental strain that caused more than 270 Hong Kongers to call the Samaritan Befrienders Hong Kong (SBHK) suicide prevention group for help in January and February as a result of emotional distress caused by the fifth wave.  And then there are the suicides of two elderly individuals who caught Covid  for fear of causing a burden to their family.  As Natalie Wong, the journalist who Tweeted about them, stated: "Hong Kong has failed them". :(