Opinion | In sparking panic buying and lockdown fear, Carrie Lam has again failed Xi’s remit

Name: Bodies pile up at hospitals and mortuaries as Hong Kong records 34,466 new Covid-19 cases
Uploaded: 2022-03-06T05:30:18.000Z
Duration: 3 min 31 s
Description: Bodies pile up at hospitals and mortuaries as Hong Kong records 34,466 new Covid-19 cases

After intense weeks of food shortages, overwhelmed hospitals and home isolation chaos, to suggest a policy U-turn on lockdown is sure to cause panic

The government must stop trying to give out assurances of certainty where there is none, and then backtracking. This gaslighting only erodes public confidence

Reading Time:3 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

People stock up at the Tai Wing lane area at Tai Po on March 2. Panic buying is not irrational when the government has shown that it is overwhelmed by the situation. Photo: K.Y. Cheng

Alice Wu

Published: 1:30pm, 6 Mar 2022

We haven’t come very far since the beginning of Covid-19. Last week’s empty supermarket shelves looked like we had gone back to February 2020, when panic buying and stockpiling toilet paper got us on international headlines. Back then, it even got a Singaporean minister to call Hongkongers “idiots”.

Most of the world, even Singapore, has got the “idiot” bug since, so much so that studies have been conducted on toilet paper hoarding. And now that Hong Kong is riding our fifth and worst wave yet, all those experts explaining away the universal run on the rolls may help our government officials understand why and where they have failed.

Toilet paper is a basic primal need and, according to psychologist Mary Alvord, there is comfort in knowing we have it. In times of uncertainty, panic buying and stockpiling makes us feel we have some control.

Call it “dynamic fight or flight”: we can’t fight the virus and we can’t run from it, so we hoard as much as we can as a direct and visceral response to our acute anxiety. And in recent weeks in Hong Kong, the government has been the main driver in the spikes in our anxiety and cortisol levels.

Most of us aren’t convinced by the government slogan, “Together, we fight the virus”. This fifth wave laid bare how little “togetherness” there is. The people toughed it out through stringent measures and made sacrifices, only for the government to bury its head in the sand.

03:31

Bodies pile up at hospitals and mortuaries as Hong Kong records 34,466 new Covid-19 cases

It took a message from President Xi Jinping to get the Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor administration to stop messing around and take on its most basic and fundamental duties: the protection of people and the security of their communities.

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