I do not know how much it costs the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) to implement the programme to screen the body temperature of visitors to its public food markets, but presumably it is substantial. Nor am I sure if this programme is effective or worth it. I visit a Kowloon public food market frequently but seldom have I noticed those responsible for monitoring temperature screening doing their job properly. Most, if not all, of the time, they are not paying attention to the temperature display but looking at their mobile phones or just daydreaming. In fact, most of them sit behind the temperature screening device which faces towards visitors, making it impossible for them to read what it displays. There are about 100 public markets in Hong Kong, and assuming that each of them has about eight people involved in the temperature screening job and that each of them receives the minimum statutory wages of HK$37.50 per hour , I have worked out their total annual wages to be about HK$130 million. This is only the wages of these people, not including the FEHD’s administrative fees. I wonder if the FEHD has a system to monitor that the programme is in order and that everyone is doing his/her job properly. Does the department have any effective means to evaluate whether the programme works and is of value? For example, does the department have any statistics on how many market visitors have failed in temperature screening and thus have been refused market entry, or referred to elsewhere for Covid-19 testing? Why are most Hongkongers choosing not to get vaccinated for Covid-19? The body temperature screening programme has been in place for over a year. Will the department let us know what the 2021-22 budget for this is? For how long will the department keep this programme going? Now that Hong Kong is at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel, will it scale down the programme? At what point will it stop? At this difficult time, when so many people and companies are begging for government help, I think the FEHD has a duty to convince us, with concrete facts and figures, and not just with broad policy statements, that the vast sum of taxpayers’ money it is spending on this programme is justified. H. Tsang, Kowloon Bay
