Opinion | End the Covid-19 hysteria, reopen Hong Kong and give us back our lives
- Gripped by panic, even Hongkongers are treating their city as if it were a giant leper colony
- Only the new government can reverse the fear, and undo the excessive and absurd Covid-19 restrictions, which will allow confidence to return
It is now clear that the first action incoming chief executive John Lee Ka-chiu needs to take on July 1, as soon as he has been sworn in, is to open up Hong Kong to the outside world and to its own people.
But this is just a symptom of what is wrong. The cause is the sense of panic, veering on hysteria, which has gripped the community over Covid-19. The government and media share responsibility for creating and sustaining this feeling of doom, but only the government can lead us out of it.
Take the issue of numbers: every government statement and news bulletin for months has led with the headline figure of cases detected in the preceding 24 hours. Yet, we all know that what counts is the number of new hospitalisations and of those, the number requiring intensive care.
These are the best indicators of the seriousness of the outbreak which we need to understand to minimise deaths. We know enough about Covid-19 to understand that 100 cases per day could represent disaster whereas 1,000 or even 10,000 might be relatively inconsequential. So why do we lead every news report with the crudest number?
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