Letters | Why a flight ban on Australia, but not Japan and South Korea?
- Readers call for a review of the countries on Hong Kong’s no-fly list, express doubts over the effectiveness of mass testing, and question why consumption vouchers were not used to boost vaccination rates
Stopping travellers arriving in Hong Kong from Australia and a few other countries to give the Hong Kong government more time to understand the Omicron variant and prepare for a possible outbreak was reasonable, if it was for a short period of time.
Yet given the decreasing number of cases in Australia, it is unreasonable to extend the flight suspension. Australia is recording around 20,000-30,000 daily new cases, with a very low death rate. Meanwhile, Japan and South Korea have more than 50,000 new cases a day, but are not on the list of no-fly countries. It is completely unfair to those Hongkongers in Australia who are desperate to go home.
Did the Hong Kong government not properly review the latest figures in each of the eight listed countries before extending the flight suspension?
I sincerely would like to know the government’s reasons for putting Australia in the same category as countries like the United Kingdom, France and the United States, where Covid-19 is more prevalent, and where many of the imported cases in Hong Kong were from.