Letters | Hong Kong coronavirus testing scheme: 12-hour shifts are a disgrace
- That staff had to work long hours, wear diapers to forgo toilet breaks and experienced muscle soreness indicate poor programme design
To think that any organisation, let alone a government body devoted to health, could countenance staff working for 12 hours, and up to eight hours without a toilet break and thus feeling obliged to wear diapers, is truly astounding.
The hygiene implications in a supposedly clean-room laboratory environment are hard to exaggerate, let alone the insult to human dignity involved. I suspect that any private sector employer who allowed this to happen, regardless of whether it was authorised or not, would be investigated and possibly prosecuted by the Labour Department.
Further, that the process for handling the testing involved processes which cause “muscle soreness in [the] shoulders and hands” of staff indicates poor design and insufficient care towards any health and safety assessment which might have been carried out. Was there one?
The workers, and even the processes, may be from the mainland, but the supervision is undeniably the responsibility of the Hong Kong government.
