LETTER SCMP:
A socially-distanced Rugby Sevens, with vaccine mandates, food mandates, testing mandates and mask mandates. What fun!
It's as if we don't know anything about Covid.
Even more fun: Marshalls patrolling the crowd to make sure everyone is properly distanced, and masked after taking a bite of whatever food they are allowed to eat.
I can't imagine anything less fun, less like the traditional rowdy spirit of the Sevens, less like something to visit Hong Kong for.
But we do.
In the Australian football season just completed, many millions of fans crowded football fields around the country, all unmasked. The Covid numbers for that period don't show any impact of this free approach. During the peak football season, case number, hospitalisations and covid deaths all declined. Even after the most heavily attended games — the Finals at end September -- there was zero discernible jump in Covid case numbers.*
Why do we keep acting as if there's no experience anywhere else in the world?
Jason Wordie is correct: (Dear Hong Kong Tourism Board, enough of the clichés – the city just isn't what it was, 21 October) we won't entice people back to Hong Kong with cliches, but with actions. The first and most important action has to be to get rid of all Covid restrictions. All.
Colonel Sir Maudlin McGruff (Ret.)
Discovery Bay
Hong Kong
ADDED: SCMP trying to sound enthusiastic for the Sevens. “A Sevens like no other”. Then blames Covid for the problems. No. It’s the Covid restrictions.
*Both hospitalisations and deaths followed similar patterns as case numbers for Australia, for the period of the Australian football season: 14 March to 31 September.
