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A woman wearing a protective face mask walks past stacks of toilet paper for sale in the Tsuen Wan district of Hong Kong on February 8. The Hong Kong government has rejected calls to use emergency legislation to crack down on price-gouging retailers amid a citywide shortage of face masks. Photo: AFP
OpinionLetters

Letters | As coronavirus crisis leaves Hong Kong leaders wringing their hands, Joshua Wong steals the march with masks

Coronavirus pandemic
Letters
Letters
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“Our” government was able to speedily pass a law under the Emergency Regulations Ordinance to ban the wearing of face masks, even in peaceful public processions. But it cannot find the energy to propose, let alone pass, a law on mask price and supply to protect the poor’s access to affordable masks and reduce their risk of death – surely the ultimate emergency (“No emergency measures to stop Hong Kong’s price-gouging mask retailers”, February 10).

Yet a single citizen, Joshua Wong, can show more empathy, action and actual results than the whole apparatus of government. His group Demosisto has bought 100,000 masks from the US to be distributed among those in need.

Could there be a clearer demonstration of the moral, ethical, legal and practical vacuum at the heart of our government and governing system?

This failure moves beyond incompetence and into criminal irresponsibility, in the social sense, though the social faculty seems inaccessible to Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and her advisers, who remain, to their public shame, by her side.

Paul Serfaty, Mid-Levels

‘Born in a lab’ accusations make light of a tragedy

I commend your correspondent Alex Lo’s trenchant comments on US senator Tom Cotton’s suspicions that China bio-engineered the coronavirus originating in Wuhan (“US senator plays the fool on coronavirus”, February 11)

Media headlines this week, including in the US, all carried the sad news that deaths from this new coronavirus have topped 1,300 in mainland China.

Whilst in no way wishing to play down this tragic situation, a search of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention website shows that the estimated number of deaths from flu in the US from 2010 were between 12,000 and 61,000 annually.

We should all take care, but we should not panic. Perhaps we might also ask Senator Cotton that if he believes in countries bio-engineering a flu virus. Then is the US version, again, No 1?

Dr K.M. Choy, Kowloon City

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