And now it’s all fine. Why the change of tone? Maybe some relaxation from up north? Maybe just the press of public opinion which has just had it — we here in Hong Kong being the most locked down and quarantined in the world. China aside.
I always doubted the “hospitalisations crisis”, based on the figures I was able to infer. Now, at last, the Post shows figures that confirm: there’s no hospitalisations crisis. There were always too any people with minor or even no symptoms being hospitalised, using the hospitals as de facto quarantine centres. According to this article, that’s still happening, despite some of our experts telling the government it has to stop. Imagine: you fill the wards with people not at all sick and then cry “hospitalisations crisis”!
Still, there’s no real relaxation. Just not a further tightening. We still have our social distancing rules, dining numbers restrictions, dining curfews,, RAT test rules for everything, vaccine passports rules, tracing rules, testing rules, masking rules, the whole panoply of what’s shown itself ineffective, by comparison with other places who are not doing all the above — Singapore, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Australia— but who are doing just as well. I watched an AFL Final (Cats v Magpies. Fabulous match!) last Saturday, 80,000+ at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, not a single mask in sight. That’s been going on for months, with no big deal in new infections or deaths per million. We in HK are still freaked out, cancelling cross-country running races and planning a Rugby Sevens in November that’s going to be socially distanced (!) and fully masked up. Food, but no drink. That’ll go well … not.
/Snip:
When Hong Kong topped 10,000 Covid-19 infections in a single day last week, anxious residents were left wondering how bad the latest surge would be.
Was the city on the brink of seeing overcrowded hospitals and a high death toll and the return of strict pandemic restrictions, just like earlier this year when the fifth wave of infections struck?
Health experts and researchers have told the Post they do not expect anything as dire, emphasising that the current situation was unlike what happened earlier in several ways. Read on…
