Hong Kong's pandemic nightmare continues, no thanks to continued the authorities' political shenanigans

Long lines outside a vaccination center dispensing Sinovac vaccines

 

Has Hong Kong's fifth coronavirus wave peaked?  There are some suggestions that it has done so since, following three consecutive days of over 50,000 new cases being reported last week, yesterday saw a fall in the number of reported new cases from 37,529 on Saturday to 31,008 -- and ditto today, with the reporting of 25,150 new cases (32 of which are imported ones). 

 

But the more suspicious minded among us wonder whether the fall in the number of reported cases is due more to fewer people being required to undergo Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) testing or and many people not reporting their positive Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) results to the government.  With regards to the latter: there appear to be few incentives for -- and many disincentives against -- reporting one's positive RAT results.  Also, the government's website that allowed people to do so online was only launched today! 

 

Starkly put: How many Hong Kongers do you reckon would want to end up being quarantined in a facility run by the Security Bureau, like has happened to some unfortunates?  And this even before negative reports came out about how terrible they physically are (and, to add to the inconvenience, equipped with Chinese-style sockets that are incompatible with Hong Kong plugs) and badly they are being run.  

 

And while a man admitted to the Security Bureau facility at Tsing Yi appeared to have reacted in an overly dramatic way to not having provided with a single meal for a whole day (by threatening to kill himself!), I must admit to having reacted with quite a bit horror too upon reading that the Security Bureau also will have a hand in deciding who is sent to the Community Isolation Facilities that are ostensibly for Covid patients but look too much like prisons (complete with bars on their windows) for my liking!  This particularly since that piece of information came in the wake of the news that the Hong Kong government is going to deploy some 4,000 riot police officers "to assist in the city’s upcoming mass Covid-19 testing" and "escort [Covid] patients to the hospital or community isolation facilities and enforce building lockdowns"!     

 

As Bloomberg editor Matthew Brooker Tweeted in the wake of this news: "Everything is a security issue in Hong Kong."  Alternatively, here's Hong Kong-based history professor Noah Shusterman's Tweeted reaction to the news of the Hong Kong riot police going to be "assisting" in transporting Covid patients: "When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a skull."

 

All in all, the Hong Kong government has certainly not covered itself in glory with regards to its handling of the pandemic.  Among the people showing a lack of confidence in the authorities: expats, including bankers, who have decided to leave Hong Kong in droves (along with those Hongkongers upset with not just Hong Kong's Covid situation, and whose exodus began months earlier).  And for the record: "A total of 5,082 people departed Hong Kong on Sunday, the most since the city was hit with its most severe and far-reaching wave of Covid"; and "[n]et departures from Hong Kong reached 22,965 in [the] week ending March 6, [making it the] third record in a row".  

 

And then there are the deaths. 280 Covid deaths were reported in Hong Kong today; and 1,438 in the past week.  And while the elderly (especially the unvaccinated among them) continue to be the most likely to succumb to Covid, two of today's deaths involved young children: one 8 years of age; the other of whom was just four years old.  

 

A comparison of Hong Kong vis a vis three other Asia-Pacific territories also currently experiencing severe Omicron waves is eye-opening, particularly with regards to the number of Covid deaths in Hong Kong vis a vis Singapore, Taiwan and New Zealand.  To be clear: only Hong Kong has "an extremely high death toll" -- because of the low vaccination levels among Hong Kong's elderly and more of Hong Kong's vaccinated having been vaccinated with the less protective/effective Sinovac as opposed to, say, BioNTech/Pfizer or Moderna.  Something else which Hong Kong-based microbiologist Siddharth Sridhar has pointed out as contributing to this disaster: "overwhelmed healthcare".        

 

Another Hong Kong-based medical expert, David Owens, sums up Hong Kong's current pandemic situation as follows: "This is what happens when public health policy ignores science [.]  Predictable, preventable and political".  Speaking of political: The Hong Kong police today re-arrested Winnie Yu, the nurse-activist who was the founder and chairwoman of the Hospital Authority Employees Alliance (HAEA), a labour union representing Hospital Authority staff.  

 

Yu had been arrested on February 28th of last year along with 46 others who organized and/or took part in the July 2020 democratic camp primaries that may well be the last time Hong Kongers got to vote for political candidates they actually liked, respected and wanted to represent them but was one of the minority of individuals let out on bail ahead of the arrestees' national security law trial which still has yet to properly get underway.  

 

And I sincerely hope that those of her former colleagues at the Hospital Authority who recently spoke out against the Hong Kong government's zealous pursuit of  the "Covid Zero" strategy (dynamic or not) do not suffer her fate.  If only the authorities would listen to the frontliners rather than threaten and/or overload them.  Frankly, it doesn't sound like they need medical experts, especially those from Mainland China, to tell them what's happening and what should be done.  

 

A few sample quotes from the Hong Kong Free Press article yesterday about them should well illustrate this: "As public hospitals become increasingly overcrowded, frustration has grown among frontline medics who said the government continues to stand by the same Covid-19 policy as two years ago, when little was known about the virus and vaccines were not available"; "Resources and manpower are being deployed from hospitals to isolation facilities for patients with minimal symptoms, while inconsistent government messaging has sent healthy Covid-positive patients rushing to emergency units, causing days-long waits for those needing urgent attention"; and "It was always a very stupid idea to think we could have zero Covid forever".