Opinion | No excuses for Hong Kong officials' slow response to flu outbreak and parallel trading
Albert Cheng says the government has failed the Hong Kong people by not acting sooner and more decisively to nip the problems in the bud
Fan Zhongyan, a reformist in the Chinese imperial court in the 11th century, set the bar for generations of mandarins to come. A leader, he said, must be the first to worry and the last to enjoy.
This attitude of serving the people, with a nose for crises, is conspicuously absent at the Hong Kong government headquarters in Tamar. Our officials are often jolted into action only after an issue has degenerated to crisis proportions.
Take the current influenza outbreak. The media sounded the alarm last month when the tally of flu-related deaths this year began to mount at a worrying rate. The latest count is now more than 170 and is increasing by as many as six to eight cases per day.
Legislator Dr Kwok Ka-ki, who used to represent the medical sector in the functional constituencies but is now a directly elected lawmaker, was so frustrated with the administration's inaction that he raised an urgent question in the assembly last week. Only then did our health bureaucrats start holding regular media briefings.
According to Professor Yuen Kwok-yung, the head of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong, we are only in the midst of the peak flu season and more fatalities are expected. A second wave is also likely in the summer.
In contrast, the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic claimed 299 lives in Hong Kong. Unlike the doomsday scenario in 2003, today, we are not fighting an unknown virus.