Opinion | Hong Kong had no plan for the coronavirus fifth wave and we’re paying now

I didn’t think our government could be more disorganised and unprepared than it had been for the fifth wave of Covid-19, but the sight of beds, patients, tents and health workers gathered outside overwhelmed public hospitals shocked me to the bone. Was this what things had come to in Hong Kong: are we caring for the sick while battling the elements? We should be better than that.

We’ve fallen short, way short. For about two years, we bought time with one of the harshest and most stringent strategies that have kept families apart for protracted periods of time and deprived schoolchildren of thousands of hours of learning, playing, and growing up in a safe environment, and yet, amid the onslaught of Omicron, it is unclear how all that time we bought is paying off.

In the current wave of infection, people were quick to note an unusual trend in the daily tallies of confirmed cases and preliminary positive cases: they didn’t add up. Our health authorities admitted that our testing capacities were maxed out, and those backlogged cases awaiting confirmation ran from hundreds to thousands. And just like that, those daily tallies stopped being a useful indicator.

Our public hospitals are at such full capacity that some patients have recovered (or tested negative) while waiting to be admitted.

Instead, in January’s chaotic public estate lockdowns came a glimpse of the government’s haplessness. Yet our chief executive, speaking then on the subject of asking the central government for assistance, merely said she would not be averse to the idea.

More than two weeks would go by before the chief secretary finally led a delegation of officials to meet mainland officials in Shenzhen.