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Coronavirus Hong Kong
OpinionComment
Mike Rowse
Mike Rowse

Opinion | How to end Hong Kong’s fifth wave, and make the city feel more like home again and less like a prison

  • The top priority must be to vaccinate and protect the vulnerable, followed by targeting quarantine, social distancing and mask mandates once that is finished
  • The faster a coherent strategy to end the pandemic emerges, the sooner Hongkongers’ morale will return

Reading Time:3 minutes
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People queue up in Kornhill, Quarry Bay, on March 10, the first day of the reopening of barber shops and hair salons under Hong Kong’s Vaccine Pass scheme. There should now be a similar relaxation for beauty parlours, gyms, swimming pools and so on. Photo: Felix Wong
Mike Rowse

The most urgent thing Hongkongers need right now is a boost to their morale and confidence. That will only come when they feel the authorities have a clear strategy for dealing with the pandemic and a coherent, logical plan to implement it.

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They want to see a road back to normality. All they can see at the moment is an administration imitating a bunch of headless chickens.

Earlier this month, I posted on Facebook about three reports which had appeared in the local media in the space of 24 hours: “There will not be a lockdown”, “There might be a lockdown” and “Lockdown starts March 17”. The source of all three was different government officials either directly on the record or by way of a background briefing.
How are citizens supposed to take comfort from this and the assurance there is no need to panic? They did not take comfort, of course, and duly stripped supermarket shelves.

The collapse in public morale was palpable when the number of new infections rose to over 40,000 a day more than two years after the pandemic began. This was all for nothing, friends said to me, referring to the sacrifices of the past two years. It is easy to understand the long faces.

04:16

Hong Kong converts 3 public hospitals into Covid-only facilities in latest effort to fight 5th wave

Hong Kong converts 3 public hospitals into Covid-only facilities in latest effort to fight 5th wave

We could forgive the administration the privations of the first year of the pandemic. It was new, nobody had a complete answer and, by enforcing strict social distancing, Hong Kong had a good record in terms of the number of infections and related deaths.

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