Coronavirus in the Year of the Rat calls for a decisive Carrie Lam, not the passive leader seen during the protests

A crisis is no time to be leaderless. Yet here Hong Kong is again, the Wuhan coronavirus casting a pall over the city even as the protest movement remains unresolved. Health care workers, like the police, are on the front lines, expected to find a solution to what officials have been dawdling over.

Ironically, for ordinary citizens, the best defence, apart from cleanliness, is surgical face masks, which, given demand, are in short supply. 

There are obvious similarities to the severe acute respiratory syndrome pandemic in 2003, when 299 Hong Kong lives were lost to a virus that had its origins in Guangdong province. There was similar government reluctance to act at first, and the outbreak also coincided with efforts to introduce a controversial law that sparked protests.

But authorities responded differently to the criticism, eventually admitting mistakes and several top officials, including the first chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, were forced from office.

Tung’s successor several times removed, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, returned from the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on Saturday and announced a series of measures that should have been made a week earlier. Among them was an indefinite suspension of trains and planes from Wuhan, extending the school break and calling off the annual Hong Kong marathon.