Fifth wave Hong Kong signs outside
the Legislative Council building
In recent days, there has been much (international media) coverage of Hong Kong's fifth coronavirus wave disaster -- for good reason. Maria Ilaria Sala's article for The Guardian on Friday had this stark headline: "Here in Hong Kong, Covid has surged and we’ve run out of coffins. Please learn from our mistakes". And Timothy McLaughlin's piece in The Atlantic includes the following choice quotes about Hong Kong's situation:
[I]n early 2020, Hong Kong was ahead of the COVID curve, not lagging behind it. As soon as news emerged of a still-mysterious virus, everyone here began wearing masks and adapted to social distancing almost immediately; I wrote article after article about what life would look like in the weeks to come in America, having seen the future myself. While the West was caught off guard, Hong Kong felt prepared.Now medical facilities are overwhelmed with sick patients, and because morgues have struggled to keep pace, body bags are piled up in hospitals alongside patients still receiving treatment. Coffins are being shipped in to meet the demand. Construction workers are racing to build isolation facilities, including one that looks like a wartime field hospital on the border with the mainland. Some 300,000 people are in isolation or under home quarantine. After recording only 213 deaths and about 13,000 cases of COVID-19 from January 2020 to early 2022, the city is swamped by the current Omicron wave, which began at the start of the year and has led to more than 960,000 cases and more than 4,600 deaths.
That article came out on Thursday. Just one day later, Hong Kong's number of Covid cases passed the 1 million mark and its death toll exceeded 5,000. And this despite the daily reported number of cases and deaths having dropped sufficiently to provide confirmation that we are over the peak of the fifth wave. Put it another way: the numbers are still on the disturbingly high side; with today's involving 14,068 new cases and 223 new reported deaths.
Nevertheless, a good number of people in Hong Kong are feeling better this evening than they have for a number of days, even weeks, because of a series of announcements made by Carrie Lam this morning involving the scrapping of Covid flight bans, the reduction of the quarantine period for incoming travellers from 14 days down to seven days and the setting out of a time table for relaxing social distancing measures. Oh, and there also is the announcement that plans for Compulsory Universal Testing of Hong Kong residents has been "suspended".
Still, though those who are inclined to celebrate this would do well to remember to remember the Extradition bill saga (which involved a suspension before a long overdue withdrawal but also development for the worse soon afterwards) as well as Carrie Lam's words today that "I am not saying today that we will definitely not do this". Put another way: how can we really trust her and what she says? This is not least because she's prone to flip flops, if not playing with the truth and delivering outright lies. And it doesn't instill confidence that the day earmarked for the resumption of flights to Hong Kong from the nine currently banned countries (which include the U.S.A., U.K. and Australia) is April 1st: April Fool's Day!
In all seriousness though, there's also the fact of so much damage having already been wreaked on Hong Kong and the Hong Kong government's attempts to stem the flow of exiting expats and international businesses, never mind local residents, is already too little too late. Thus it was that in her report today about Carrie Lam's announcement that some of Hong Kong's Covid restrictions will be relaxed (beginning from next month), CNN's Kristie Lu Stout also talked about the damage down to lives and livelihoods, and referred to the city where she currently is based as "a once vital world city" rather than one that is remains so. :(
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