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Feast or Famine | Covid-19 brings grim tidings for the restaurant business in Hong Kong, as fourth wave leads to more closures
- This has been a year of Covid-19 lockdowns, face masks, dining restrictions and restaurants shutting down
- As the fourth wave continues, it’s hard to feel optimistic for the F&B industry in 2021
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This is around the time of year when journalists fill their columns with predictions about what the new year will bring.
I could do that, but it would be too depressing.
Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic isn’t going to be over any time soon, just because the calendar year ticks over from 2020 to 2021 (or from the Year of the Rat to the Year of the Ox). Even with the promise of the various vaccines (assuming you can get them in whichever country you live in), it’s going to take months before everyone will receive the shot that is supposed to protect us from the virus. And because it’s so new, nobody knows how long the vaccine will be effective.
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I don’t think any of us expected 2020 to be this bad, even after we’d heard warnings in early January of a mysterious illness in China that was making its way to Hong Kong and other countries. On alert, due to our experience with Sars in 2003 (which, as it turns out, killed far fewer people than Covid-19), Hong Kong people started wearing masks quite early on.
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I remember vividly the first day I wore my mask: it was January 24, on the evening before the start of Chinese New Year. And I haven’t stopped since, except during the times when I ran out of face masks and they couldn’t be found in shops. It’s been almost a full year of wearing masks.
Between then and now, Hong Kong has had four waves of the virus; the current one – the worst yet – is the most enduring, and the number of new daily cases is not declining.
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