As Hong Kong battles a new wave of COVID-19 infections with yet another round of social restrictions, a sense of fatigue with the confusing and inconsistent nature of the territory’s pandemic response is setting in among business owners and residents.
Although the Asian financial center has thus far been relatively unscathed — total COVID-19 cases amounting to just 81 cases per 100,000 people out of a densely packed 7 million population — Hong Kong has encountered more waves than most other places and is entering its fourth round of stop-start restrictions.
“Hong Kong has undoubtedly been lucky with the pandemic so far. What has been missing is a clear, public road map as to how and when restrictions will be implemented and when the rules will be relaxed,” said Nicholas Thomas, an associate professor at the City University of Hong Kong.
Illustration: Yusha
COVID-19 has been an unpredictable and volatile foe, warranting nimble and quick-changing reaction from governments. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic approaches its first anniversary, Hong Kong residents and business owners are increasingly looking to the structured response systems in place in regional neighbors like Singapore, South Korea and New Zealand in envy.
The former British colony’s comparatively erratic response is deepening the crisis in an economy already on its knees from months of restive street protests followed by the pandemic, they say.
The sharp rise in new local cases in the past two weeks is linked to social dancing venues, yet officials have announced a closure of bars, karaoke rooms and massage parlors. Like in previous rounds, the restrictions are imposed for a week or two at a time, leaving business owners in a state of suspended animation and unable to plan long term.
“At the moment, I’m waiting for Friday afternoon to see if they’re closing more classrooms,” said Stephanie Holding, a mother of three sons who runs her own business from home.
She would rather see a system that lets people “know what’s affected and when,” she said.
The Hong Kong government says it takes a flexible “suppress and lift” approach to COVID-19 restrictions based on the advice of medical experts.
However, other “high-risk” businesses like gyms and restaurants do not know when they would be asked to close, and only some are required to enforce a little-used health code app before allowing patrons in.
To add to the confusion, schooling and childcare services for younger kids were earlier this month shut down again — because of an outbreak of the common cold and not COVID-19.
In other places with different phases or alert levels that determine what restrictions are activated at what stage of infection, “we know we’ve reached this level and this is what will take place next,” said Allan Zeman, an economic adviser to Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) and chairman of Lan Kwai Fong Group, a major landlord in the territory’s bar district.
“You have a sense of this is what we need to do to get back to zero, rather than just ad hoc decisionmaking week by week,” Zeman said.
The government defends its approach by saying that the public alert level systems employed elsewhere would not work in Hong Kong.
Lam Ching Choi (林正財), a medical doctor and member of the chief executive’s advisory Executive Council, said that he did not believe that a “very structured approach” was right for what he touts as “the most free economy in the world.”
Instead, Lam Ching Choi likened the Hong Kong approach to “precision medicine,” and said that the focus was on maintaining normality as far as possible rather than turning to blanket lockdowns.
“So when you walk in our city, you don’t really feel like COVID-19 is going on, apart from wearing masks,” he said.
The risk is that this “precision” is seen as arbitrary by businesses: With no current COVID-19 clusters directly linked to the bar industry, the latest ruling for bars to shut down has “zero scientific basis,” said David McEwan, owner of Bobby’s Rabble, a bar in Hong Kong’s Central district.
Although bars and nightclubs are generally regarded as high-risk locations in every country, businesses in the territory say that they lack understanding of the level at which they would be singled out and what circumstances would allow them to reopen.
“This is one of the busiest times of the year, and we have no idea if it’s a week or will there be a extension every week like last time,” said Ravi Beryar, managing director of Liquid Management, which operates two nightlife venues in Hong Kong’s main bar districts.
Beryar and others say that they would like a more methodical and transparent approach akin to that of other countries in the Asia-Pacific region who have been among the most successful in the world in containing the spread of COVID-19.
For example, New Zealand early on introduced a four-tier alert system and has been widely lauded for its clarity in communicating the system to its citizens.
Singapore in May announced a three-phase roadmap for the gradual resumption of normal life.
South Korea, which has been reporting its highest number of new cases in eight months, has also been continuously enforcing and relaxing social restrictions in response to case numbers.
However, its strategy is dictated by a five-step system whereby certain measures are triggered when cases reach a certain threshold. Currently, South Korea is in level 2 of restrictions, meaning that restaurants can only operate limited hours and high-risk facilities are closed.
New Zealand tops Bloomberg’s COVID Resilience Ranking, which assesses countries’ success in controlling the pandemic with minimal disruptions to everyday life. South Korea ranks fourth, while Singapore comes in at 11th, one spot ahead of Hong Kong.
“While the real world is inevitably more messy than a lab, having a clear structure that is above politics help to foster trust in the response strategies,” Thomas said.
Another group frustrated with Hong Kong’s response are parents who have endured up to three rounds of school closures. The latest, the shutting down of only nurseries and kindergartens — followed by the first three years of elementary school — was triggered by an outbreak of upper respiratory tract infections and not COVID-19.
“In other countries, they are keeping schools open at all costs,” said Rosheen Rodwell, a mother of three children who said that communications from the government has been lacking in terms of whether they are prioritizing schools. “People are prepared to get on board and make sacrifices if they understand why.”
Lam Ching Choi said that the overall strategy is now to keep schools open, having learned from epidemiological studies from around the world that it is “relatively safe” to do so.
The closure of kindergartens was necessary as upper respiratory tract infections are indistinguishable from COVID-19 without testing, and the plan is to open them again as soon as possible, he said.
David Heymann, an expert on infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that Hong Kong still has a far higher capacity for contact-tracing and cluster-busting than many other countries.
“They’re actually finding where transmission is occurring, they are shutting it down, and then they are cautiously reopening it again to see whether or not transmission increases,” Heymann said, adding that as pandemic fatigue grows around the world, people need more information as the cycle repeats.
“Transparency is the most important. If the governments are being transparent as to why they are closing down then yes, people will better understand,” he said.
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