Hong Kong stares into Covid-19 abyss and has only itself to blame
- Yonden Lhatoo laments the complacency that has rolled back the city’s exemplary success against the coronavirus and left it battling a resurgent crisis that threatens to overwhelm the public health care system
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure.”
To think that just weeks ago this city was the envy of the world for its exemplary efficiency in handling the coronavirus crisis and its remarkable success in putting a lid on the scourge of our times. Not any more. Now we are staring into the abyss again. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Coronavirus social distancing becoming a joke in Hong Kong that will end in tears for everyone
I’m talking about streets filled with haj-sized crowds of shoppers and loiterers, commuters piling into trains and buses like lemmings, beaches packed to the gills with swimmers and sunbathers, bars and restaurants jammed with wining and dining enthusiasts, large social gatherings with people not giving a damn about wearing masks or avoiding handshakes and spraying saliva-filled conversations into each other’s faces at close range – sorry to say, social distancing was happening mostly on paper, not so much in practice.
The government is just as much to blame, a victim of its own success, allowing infection loopholes such as exempting air and sea crews from mandatory quarantine and testing, and, blinkered by falling official statistics, underestimating the risk posed by silent Covid-19 carriers in the community.
Now we pay the price, with Hong Kong back to reporting daily infections in high double digits, and announcing a single-day, near-record of 60 locally transmitted cases even as I write this.
If that’s not worrying enough, health authorities are unable to trace the sources of nearly 40 per cent of the infections so far this month. How do you fight, clueless, against the unknown?
The geographical distribution of cases and details of patients denote that the coronavirus is everywhere and infecting anyone, from vegetable sellers and restaurant staff to bus and taxi drivers, pilots, medical professionals and civil servants.
The new clusters have also started taking a worrying toll on our senior citizens now – five deaths in six days and outbreaks in care homes for the elderly means it just got very real for the most vulnerable members of our community.
Selfish, reckless people squander Hong Kong’s gains in war against coronavirus
Hong Kong’s point person on tackling this crisis, Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the Centre for Health Protection’s communicable disease branch, warned this week that the situation was “getting a bit out of hand”. Don’t you just love the euphemism.
Well, even if it’s a bit after the fact, officials have ramped up measures now, including making mask-wearing mandatory on public transport. While that should help, masks are not the be-all and end-all of immunity, and there are still way too many people out and about.
Not everyone has the luxury of working from home, of course, and many need to be in the streets or at their workplaces to earn a living, to keep the wheels of commerce turning, sure. But so many others who can afford to work from home or stay home are not doing it.
04:08
After China, is America the next big coronavirus threat to the world?
By the way, the full version of the famous quote by the late former Intel CEO Andrew Grove that I used at the beginning of this column ends with one more line: “Only the paranoid survive.”
While I would never recommend paranoia as a default position under normal circumstances, desperate times call for desperate measures. Perhaps a little fear will help flatten the curve.
Yonden Lhatoo is the chief news editor at the Post
