Day or night, it’s usually hard to see the asphalt on these streets in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay district. It is one of the busiest arteries in a cosmopolitan city. Thousands of people and cars usually occupy all the free spaces, in dynamics that evoke the activity of a large hive.
But the last 15 days the street looks like this, practically deserted. Shops closed, public transport suspended, a few passers-by braving the persistent drizzle. It is an almost phantasmagorical image of a big city: the bad dream of feeling alone in a mass of concrete.
The fault lies with the coronavirus. As some countries struggle to return to pre-pandemic routines, others are experiencing their worst waves of disease to date. This is the case of Hong Kong. The authorities are applying severe containment measures. A strange silence reigns in normally noisy neighborhoods. The nightmare is not over yet.
