HONG KONG — As the government in Hong Kong struggles to contain the worst-ever Covid outbreak in the city, some residents have panicked. They have emptied the supermarket shelves with vegetables and meat. They’ve raided drug stores for pain and fever medications. Those who could afford it have jumped on flights out of town.
Tens of thousands of new Omicron cases are reported every day and deaths have skyrocketed. The fear gripping Hong Kong is not just about the explosion of infections, but also about what the government will do next. Mixed messages from officials left residents wondering: Will there be a lockdown? Shall we be sent to isolation facilities? Will our children be taken from us if they test positive?
Under pressure from Beijing to eliminate infections, Hong Kong officials have vowed to test all 7.4 million residents. Such an operation would require restricting people’s movements, but the government was ambiguous about whether it would impose a lockdown, and if so, when. Only the possibility of one, however, caused the flight for groceries and other necessities.
“I’ve been here most of my life, through it all, and it’s never gotten to anything like the panic I’ve seen in the public,” said Allan Zeman, 72, a real estate developer and advisor to Hong Kong’s leader. Kong, Carrie Lam.
The city’s death rate from the virus is currently one of the highest in the world, at three per 100,000 inhabitants, mainly because many elderly Hong Kongers have not been vaccinated. (However, since the start of the pandemic, Covid has killed Americans far more often than people in other wealthy countries, as well as Hong Kong.)
Hong Kong is one of the last places in the world still trying to eradicate the coronavirus, instead of living with it. It has doubled down on a strategy of isolating every case found, regardless of severity and symptoms, and imposing quarantine orders on people deemed to be in close contact despite a shortage of facilities and workers. Rising infections, as well as government measures, have already flooded hospitals, morgues, ambulance services and quarantine facilities, forcing understaffed post offices, banks and even prisons to cut back on services.
Residents are particularly alarmed by the government’s approach to children who test positive for the coronavirus. The city erupted in protest two weeks ago after health workers took an infected 11-month-old girl from her parents and isolated her in a hospital. Normally, one parent is allowed to accompany a child, but hospitals are overcrowded, with hundreds of children trapped in Covid isolation wards. Officials later said they would organize video chats to help hospitalized children stay in touch with their relatives.
Kaylah Tong, a 35-year-old pastor, said she sent her 2-year-old son to a hospital last month after he tested positive, with a high fever and convulsions. He spent two days alone in an isolation ward.
A doctor had initially warned her that her son could be kept in isolation for weeks due to the hospital’s Covid-19 protocols, which include requiring patients to test negative before being discharged. That made Ms. Tong concerned about her son’s mental health.
“How could children be kept there for so long without the parents by their side, just because of the quarantine measures? I can’t accept that,” she said.
But on the third day, the hospital released Mrs. Tong take her son home to recover; his condition had improved and his hospital bed was needed. The government later said it would temporarily relax its policy so that only children with severe symptoms of the coronavirus would need to be hospitalized.
Foreign governments have also reacted with concern to Hong Kong’s pandemic measures. Citing the risk of family separation, the US consulate last week warned Americans not to travel to Hong Kong. The French consul general acknowledged that the latest measures “would have a profound impact on everyone’s lives, with a price that has been steadily rising for two years, especially for families with children”.
Consular officials have worked to help expatriates find travel arrangements to leave Hong Kong, which has banned flights from nine countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia. The Swiss consulate arranged one flight for civilians. The Irish Consulate said it had “never experienced such a high demand for consular services for those who wanted to leave.”
Hong Kong, a place once known as ‘Asia’s Global City’, now has some of the strictest travel restrictions, isolated from the rest of the world. The new uncertainty has led to the largest exodus of residents since the early days of the pandemic in 2020, with more than 70,000 net departures last month, according to immigration data.
Weeks earlier, Cordula Kotanko, a German management consultant, and her husband had considered leaving Hong Kong as their three daughters struggled with distance learning during much of the pandemic. They were also concerned about the prospect of being caught in a citywide lockdown.
Then, late last month, the government said it would bring the summer holidays forward to begin in March and April, about four months earlier than usual. Officials said they planned to use schools to conduct mass testing and isolate the sick. That brought Mrs. Kotanko and her husband pack their family and fly to Singapore.
“At that point, we just wanted to get out of Hong Kong to act so we could make decisions and not make decisions for us,” Ms Kotanko said. “What we have experienced over the past two years is that children always come last in Hong Kong and the children have had to bear a lot of the pandemic.”
The outbreak and government policies have been particularly hard on the working class in the city. Many service workers have lost their jobs due to thousands of companies going bankrupt. Families living in tiny apartments are forced to choose between staying at home and infecting relatives or sleeping elsewhere.
The state of supermarkets and pharmacies is perhaps the most clear illustration of how this international hub is collapsing under this Omicron wave.
Mannings, one of Hong Kong’s best-known drugstore chains, has had to temporarily close dozens of stores. According to the website, several painkillers and Covid test kits are out of stock. Some other drugstores in town have run out of pads and tampons.
ParknShop, a supermarket chain, has limited individual purchases of canned food, toilet paper and medicines. At Wellcom, another supermarket chain, employees put small notes on the shelves asking customers not to hoard vegetables, meat and eggs.
Last Tuesday, Betty Xiao, a college graduate, rushed to the largest supermarket in Tai Po, a northern Hong Kong neighborhood where she lives, after her roommate told her the government might announce a lockdown. Ms. Xiao wanted to stock up on food in case the online grocery delivery would be disrupted.
As she approached the store, she saw a line of customers meandering down the street. Inside, she said, she and other people grabbed items straight from cardboard boxes that employees hadn’t even unloaded onto the shelves. Mrs. Xiao said she could get the last bag of bread.
“There was a pretty tense atmosphere,” Ms. Xiao said. “I had to be quick.”
Joy Dong contributed reporting.
