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Opinion | Mask or no mask: the cultural assumptions at the heart of coronavirus crisis management
- Doctors here and in the West are trained in Western medicine, yet disagree on whether masks protect us against Covid-19
- Social distancing is the norm in the West, where Asians in masks have been targeted. Are cultural differences at work?
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Living in close proximity with China, Hongkongers were among the first people to be exposed to the threat of the coronavirus epidemic two months ago. It was still considered a regional outbreak by the World Health Organisation then, which also stressed that it could be well contained. Hong Kong reported its first cases of coronavirus on January 22. The following day, China announced a lockdown on Wuhan, a city of over 10 million people.
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I was on a work trip in Europe in early February. Waiting for my flight back to Hong Kong at Heathrow Airport, I struck up a chat with a British gentleman who asked me why in Asia people seemed so nervous about the virus. I replied that the disease was extremely contagious and could be deadly.
The gentleman said, “Well it is just another flu, I can’t imagine any other country could close down a city of 10 million.” “Don’t you feel a bit concerned?” I asked. He said, “Not really.” I joked, “Oh, you guys are strong!”
Not quite. The virus spread fast in Europe after mid-February and now America is reporting the highest number of confirmed cases in the world. Italy has the highest death toll, surpassing China. Death rates have become alarming in a number of Western countries, including Spain.
Anyone who has been following closely the development of the pandemic would not fail to have noticed different scenes in the West and the East. In places such as Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, people are wearing surgical masks, which were often secured with great effort and cost.
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