Editorial | Now we in Hong Kong all know how an emergency sounds
- Deafening buzzing may have alerted city to a hospital move many were already aware of, but the system could prove useful in future
It says something about Hong Kong’s reputation as a safe city that its residents never knew they had an emergency alert system, unless you count typhoon signals. At least that was the case until Wednesday.
Then an insistent buzzing on mobiles simultaneously drew Hongkongers’ attention to an emergency alert. It was unprecedented. It sounded a bit scary – the sort of thing you expect in places that suffer a life-threatening tsunami, eruptions, earthquakes and so on.
In this case, thankfully, it only alerted us, in English and Chinese, to the decision that Queen Elizabeth Hospital is now admitting mainly Covid-19 patients.
An emergency alert, for information the government has already put in the public domain? That may seem a bit dramatic, though it did reflect the fact that the hospital in the Kowloon Central Cluster is the city’s busiest accident and emergency centre, with 10 per cent of the Hospital Authority’s capacity for that service.
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So the information could save many non-Covid patients inconvenience and even distress during a public health emergency that is unlikely to end any time soon. It looked like a test run.