Hong Kong third wave: the focus on protests shows flawed government priorities

Name: Officials tightens restrictions again as Hong Kong reports record-high Covid-19 cases
Uploaded: 2020-07-28T02:15:10.000Z
Duration: 2 min 52 s
Description: Officials tightens restrictions again as Hong Kong reports record-high Covid-19 cases

Failure to address preserving people’s health and livelihoods reveals how blinkered national leaders have become

Unlike someone protesting for rights, someone with Covid-19 symptoms who goes on as if there is nothing wrong is harming public health

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Police officers approach protesters during a demonstration in Causeway Bay on July 1. The resurgence in Covid-19 cases in recent weeks has raised pointed questions around the amount of government resources still devoted to quelling protests. Photo: Dickson Lee

Peter Kammerer

Published: 10:15am, 28 Jul 2020Updated: 10:15am, 28 Jul 2020

A question to backers of the law aimed at safeguarding national security in Hong Kong: what is more important, preventing the spread of the coronavirus or suppressing people seeking democracy? This comes to mind each time I hear of another arrest of someone holding up a banner or chanting a slogan.

Huge police resources are being pumped into the latter. Groups of officers are posted to strategic spots to swoop in and arrest, the order obviously being to silence a right that is legally protected.

Meanwhile, rules to prevent the spread of a disease that is threatening the health of citizens and has brought the economy to its knees are being routinely flouted, a fact evident through the surging number of infections and deaths.

The law, introduced on July 1, ultimately perceives national security as being about protecting the government in power. Politics is at its heart, the crimes outlined being about secession, subversion, terrorist activities and collusion with outsiders.

There is no mention of the need to protect the health and livelihoods of the citizens of the nation, which surely outweighs preserving the longevity of those holding high office. Unveiled in the midst of the worst pandemic the world has experienced in more than a century, the failure to address so important a matter in the hastily drafted legislation reveals how blinkered the national leadership has become.

02:52

Officials tightens restrictions again as Hong Kong reports record-high Covid-19 cases

Let’s get some perspective – Hong Kong is in crisis, with the daily number of Covid-19 infections at record levels in a third wave that threatens to become a tsunami. The economy is in tatters, we are in the midst of our worst recession on record and unemployment has hit 6.2 per cent, the highest in more than 15 years. Recovery obviously depends on the handling of the health emergency, but the ever-worsening figures make for a gloomy outlook.

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