City Beat | Working from home is the new normal under coronavirus threat – might as well embrace it
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“[Most] civil servants will start to work from home from Monday, March 23 [until further notice],” Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor announced on Saturday, along with her decision to step up quarantine measures against a second wave of Covid-19 cases.
It was a relief to see Hong Kong’s leader wearing a surgical mask throughout the press conference this time, in sharp contrast to her earlier public appearances without one.
While her earlier refusal to put on a mask was well-intentioned – to help save much sought-after supplies for frontline medical staff – but counterproductive in sending mixed signals to a jittery public about taking precautions, the changed approach signalled the severity of what the city was facing in the war against the coronavirus pandemic.
Timely and necessary as the new quarantine measures were, when it came to the part about her civil service colleagues having to return to work-from-home arrangements, Lam’s defence sounded like a Freudian slip on the part of the government’s thinking, or perhaps society’s as a whole: “If the government continues from the end of January to stop providing services to the public … what will happen now?”
She did have a point in suggesting that government efficiency was affected when offices providing public services were not physically manned.