Letters | Continuing Hong Kong’s health ‘emergency’ risks public trust
- Readers discuss the city remaining legally in a state of health emergency, and the government’s approach during the fifth wave of Covid-19
Despite our current legal state of emergency, it is clear to most observers that the emergency has passed. This is true whether one takes a layperson’s definition, or that provided in Cap 599.
Hong Kong residents’ lives have largely returned to normal. We’ve almost all been vaccinated and/or have had Covid-19. We eat out, travel and live in a way that suggests we no longer perceive a health emergency. The government removing almost all pandemic-related restrictions and inviting the world to visit suggests it too no longer perceives a true state of public health emergency.
This mismatch between reality and our legal state of emergency may at first glance seem inconsequential. After all, if almost all the restrictions have been lifted where is the harm in keeping the legal state of emergency and the last few restrictions? While the short-term costs of this mismatch may be minor, it risks doing long-term harm to Hong Kong’s ability to fight future pandemics.
Like all sorts of trust, institutional legitimacy is hard won but easily lost. Trust in Hong Kong’s public health system derives from the public’s belief that its powers are used appropriately, and that it demonstrates a careful balancing of the costs of public health impositions and the benefits the public derives from them. However, that trust is fragile. The longer the government maintains a legal state of emergency when indeed we are not in an emergency, the more the legitimacy of the public health apparatus is undermined.
Like Aesop’s shepherd teaches, invoking emergencies in their absence risks leading the public to ignore future actual emergencies. If Hong Kong residents come to believe that the chief executive’s declarations of emergency do not reflect actual risk to themselves or the healthcare system, they will become less likely to follow related rules and regulations, and the effectiveness of the public health system will suffer. The time has come to end the “emergency”.