Overflowing hospitals, empty supermarket shelves and grim quarantine camps: Hong Kong is in chaos as a growing outbreak of covid-19 as the financial hub, normally renowned for its efficiency, prepares to test everyone.
Source: AFP
Many locals are furious at the government’s failure to prepare for the current wave of infections, after two years of a successful zero covid strategy at great economic cost.
Other countries that adopted the zero covid strategy, such as Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, are now learning to live with the virus while China remains clinging to the policy of eradicating even the smallest outbreak, and ordered Hong Kong to follow the same path.
The financial center is now preparing to test its 7.4 million inhabitants for covid-19 and isolate all those who test positive, despite the fact that the infection rate is out of control.
Morgues are overwhelmed, ambulances are in short supply, and infected patients spend long periods in quarantine in government facilities.
Emily, a 40-year-old mother of two, is convinced her family caught it when they spent hours in lines for coronavirus tests in February, after a case was detected in the building where she lives.
The results took 10 days and showed that all but the youngest were negative, but by then the entire family had symptoms.
“TRAUMATING”
“I never thought I would do my loved ones harm when I just wanted to cooperate with the government,” Emily told AFP, giving only her first name.
“It’s traumatizing,” he added.
The city, which has registered more than 200,000 infections in the last two months, against only 12,000 in the previous two years, is preparing for an ambitious program of mass testing and isolation.
Despite the high level of contagion of the omicron variant that prevails in the financial center, the Chinese authorities are convinced that they will succeed.
Liang Wannian, one of the architects of China’s anti-Covid strategy, arrived in Hong Kong on Monday to participate in the anti-Covid campaign.
Few details are known of what authorities will do with the thousands of cases that could be caught by mass testing, but local government chief Carrie Lam said they don’t want people recovering at home.
Some 70,000 isolation units should be available in the coming weeks, some of them in hotels and residential buildings, others in camps hastily set up with Chinese help.
But local specialists warn that the facilities are only a fraction of what will be needed.
“If we don’t have a plan how to quarantine confirmed cases, mass testing will be of no use,” Ivan Hung, a government adviser for the pandemic, told reporters.
Those who have been to the quarantine camps say conditions are grim and chaotic.
Samuel Ho, a computer specialist who spent a week at the Penny’s Bay camp, said he was given no instruction for the first two days, and his only contact with the outside world was cold food left outside his cabin.
“It’s very chaotic and very scary, and it can easily collapse one’s mind,” said Ho, who used a pseudonym to remain anonymous.
