Editorial | It’s the Hong Kong government’s duty to bring citizens home from Hubei
- The task will not be easy, but officials must be more active in liaising with local authorities in the province and the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office
About 2,700 Hong Kong residents remain stranded around locked-down Hubei province. Most of them want to come home. The government says it will send chartered flights to get healthy ID-card holders out.
All that is needed is a plan to fill flights with evacuees. This is easier said than done. They are scattered around about 37 cities in the coronavirus battle zone. It needs a lot of organisation and the cooperation of local officials already hard-pressed by the emergency.
As a result, there is still no timetable for an operation that depends on everyone being on the same page if it is to go smoothly. To make matters worse, hopes raised by an announcement on Monday that the lockdown of Wuhan – the city at the epicentre of the Covid-19 outbreak – might be relaxed to enable some people to leave were extinguished within three hours when it was revoked as having been a premature move by a subordinate working group.
That has heightened a sense of urgency about the need for action to bring Hongkongers home. On the count of numbers alone, it is no ordinary case of a government being asked to render assistance to citizens far from home. But it is a key reciprocal aspect of its duty to its people.
With the battle to control the epidemic at a decisive stage, Hongkongers stranded in the epicentre of the deadly outbreak are now among our most vulnerable citizens.