Seasons greetings, and a tourism plus pandemic update!

 

Another photo taken while out hiking last week

 

Many people have been taking advantage of the beautiful weather and long (Christmas-Boxing Day) holiday weekend to venture out to various parts of Hong Kong in recent days, and sharing their photos showing that Hong Kong is really beautiful.  Ironically, tourism sector lawmaker Perry Yiu Pak-leung also chose this past weekend to assert that "the charm of Hong Kong as a single destination is limited" -- and thus should be marketed as a twin destination along with Macau for "great synergy".

 

I'm not going to deny that Macau is not without any charms (and I do miss my once annual trips to the former Portugese enclave that used to be a convenient one hour ferry ride away).  But there's no way I believe that it's got more to offer to tourists and travellers than Hong Kong; this not least since the 118 square kilometer sized territory is dwarfed by 1,118 square kilometer Hong Kong!

 

And while it's true that Hong Kong has not had many visitors in recent years, that's due far more to Hong Kong's harsh pandemic rules and regulations -- which remain more restrictive than anything to be found in pretty much the rest of the world, especially now that Mainland China suddenly abandoned its Zero Covid ways a few weeks ago -- and the scary national security law that China imposed on it on June 30th, 2020!    

 

In addition, something that wasn't helping make Hong Kong attractive to non-Mainland Chinese tourists as well as negatively affected Hong Kongers' quality of life for several years leading up to 2020 was the vast numbers of Mainland Chinese visitors that were regularly flooding into Hong Kong (peaking at 51.04 million in 2018).  And I have to say that one of the greatest boons of the pandemic has been how much less crowded many areas of Hong Kong -- including Tsim Sha Tsui (which is home to the greatest density of hotels in Hong Kong), Mongkok (a popular shopping area) and Causeway Bay (another major shopping area) -- have been and, consequently, a greater pleasure to stroll around than previously was the case.

 

So I'd think that many Hong Kongers are absolutely not looking forward to the Hong Kong-Mainland China border reopening any time soon.  And of course this feeling is exacerbated by China currently experiencing a Covid outbreak so massive -- as in possibly 250 million people being infected in December alone! -- that it's caused the Zero Covid policy to fail spectacularly and China's top health body to stop publishing daily Covid figures (be it from shame -- since it's been estimated that the country could see as many as 1 million pandemic deaths -- or because things are so out of control that they no longer can get any reliable figures).

 

It's not just the thought of many infected people flooding into Hong Kong from Mainland China.  Rather, it's also the fear that they will overwhelm Hong Kong's health services and such.  (Something which won't be all that difficult to do since there already were concerns expressed late last week by public hospital chief Tony Ko about emergency rooms being inundated and long waiting times over the holiday period.  Oh, and the overall occupancy of medical beds in acute hospitals is currently at around 112 per cent!)

 

It really did not assure Hong Kongers that early last week, as former Hong Kong pro-democracy legislative councillor Charles Mok reported, "Mainland residents are told by Fosun Pharma, distributor of Pfizer-BioNTech's Covid vaccines in greater China region, that they can go to Hong Kong to get the bivalent vaccine."  Also, last Tuesday, the Hong Kong government announced that all of Hong Kong’s available Covid vaccines (CoronaVac, the BioNTech monovalent, and the BioNTech bivalent) were now registered as pharmaceutical products and, as such, no longer required emergency use authorization by the Secretary of Health -- paving the way for "an inevitable onslaught of mainlanders coming to the city for mRNA vaccines" which have not been available to them over in Mainland China.

 

In anticipation of this, there have been calls -- including by a University of Hong Kong virologist and the head of a Hong Kong pharmacists' group -- on the authorities "to consider charging non-residents for Covid vaccinations here".  The president of The Society of Hospital Pharmacists, William Chu, also warned that "free jabs and treatments could prompt too many to cross the border to access medical services here and burden the local system.  "People from mainland China demand for more symptomatic relief medications," he said. "They may go to Hong Kong to get more medications. At the moment they are looking for medications on the mainland but the supply is very limited.""

 

Already, there have been reports galore of Hong Kong pharmacies having run out of Panadol and related medicines thanks to people snapping them out to send to their relatives and friends in Mainland China.  I hate to say this but the sight of empty shelves is leading to talk of "locusts" again.  And, at the very least, it's adding to the fears and repulsion people have at the thought of Mainland Chinese "tourists" -- shoppers, more than anything else, really -- descending on Hong Kong in droves once more.     

We always knew that it would be a case of when, not if, they would return.  Now it's looking very much like it will happen next month, and maybe even early in January.  Ironically, up until the past few weeks, there had been suggestions that many Mainland Chinese people would want to avoid Hong Kong, seeing it as "unclean" and "tainted" (since Hong Kong's "Zero Covid" has long been more like "Dynamic Zero" rather than completely in step with what was implemented on the other side of the Hong Kong-Mainland China border).  

 

A reminder: Hong Kong's Covid numbers have been at five figures with regards to daily new cases for some time; with 18,533 reported for today alone.  Also, the daily critical, ICU and death figures have been on the rise since October.  So, yeah, the pandemic is most certainly not over -- in Hong Kong, Mainland China and the world over.  And the only reason why I don't mention Hong Kong's Covid numbers and situation as a factor in terms of attracting or detracting tourism is because Covid is rampant everywhere and people in many territories have just decided to "live with the virus"!