Opinion | How Carrie Lam’s Omicron failures forced Beijing to take over

Name: ‘There was no comprehensive plan’: Hong Kong nurse on outdoor hospital wards amid Covid surge
Uploaded: 2022-02-28T00:15:23.000Z
Duration: 4 min 27 s
Description: ‘There was no comprehensive plan’: Hong Kong nurse on outdoor hospital wards amid Covid surge

After a litany of failures that include the birthday party scandal, Beijing has assembled a team in Shenzhen to take control of Hong Kong’s pandemic situation. Beijing has been driven to intervene again – because the administration has failed to deliver

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Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor meets the media on February 22. Is the administration still in charge of policy? Photo: Edmond So

Mike Rowse

Published: 8:15am, 28 Feb 2022

This year sees the 50th anniversary of my arrival in Hong Kong. In all those years, I cannot recall seeing many things as striking as the events of the past few weeks. The central government has taken direct control of a major area of social policy after the local administration’s de facto abdication.

Since the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the understanding is that apart from defence and foreign affairs, everything else after 1997 would be handled by the local administration with “a high degree of autonomy”. Despite what many overseas critics have claimed, Beijing has generally taken great care to abide by its undertakings, and has been driven to intervene only when the Hong Kong end has proved unable to deliver.

The breakdown in Legislative Council operations led to the introduction of the political reform package, and the failure to introduce national security legislation in a timely manner resulted in the national security law.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, Hong Kong was very slow to vaccinate the population and missed opportunities to drive rates up faster. Vaccination rates recently had a welcome pick-up, but too late. We rode our luck during the first four waves but the Omicron variant has found us out.

04:27

‘There was no comprehensive plan’: Hong Kong nurse on outdoor hospital wards amid Covid surge

This was vividly illustrated by recent scenes outside our testing centres and hospitals. Crowds queuing up to be tested without practising social distancing. Patients on beds in hospital car parks waiting for admission. So much for Asia’s world city.

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