Letters | Flight suspension: why Hong Kong’s ‘punishment’ of airlines does not serve public health
- Readers discuss the lack of basis for the flight suspension mechanism, the stress of constantly rescheduling travel arrangements, the long wait for a Chinese victory over Omicron, and the result of China’s wariness of others’ experience
In broad terms, punishment theory can be divided into two types – retributive or utilitarian. The flight suspension mechanism makes sense under neither of these theories.
We can easily dispense with the retributive theory as a justification for the flight suspension mechanism. After all, airlines can follow the rules and still be punished with a route suspension. Airline employees can check each passenger’s test results only to have passengers test positive on arrival. In such a situation, the airline would have behaved exactly as we hoped by ensuring each passenger has tested negative, yet will still be punished. Punishing airlines for doing everything they have been instructed to do is not retributive.
So this leaves us with a utilitarian justification for the policy. Using this explanation, we might say the flight suspension mechanism seeks to limit the inflow of Covid-positive passengers into Hong Kong, regardless of whether the airline delivering them behaved as prescribed. However, this justification also quickly withers under critical examination.
Cancelling a route of a single airline does not stop passengers from coming to Hong Kong. It just forces them to reschedule or reroute their flights. If the goal is to limit passengers from a specific jurisdiction or region, location-based rather than route-based bans makes the most utilitarian sense. However, now that Hong Kong has experienced its own widespread Covid-19 wave and has levels of both current and past infections that are comparable to most of the world, location-based bans will do little to improve public health here.