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How Hong Kong engineers used lessons from Sars to solve new Covid-19 challenges for hospitals

  • Devising isolation facilities, helping businesses with infection-control measures part of the job
  • Sars crisis an eye-opener, says Hospital Authority’s chief engineer, now head of professional body

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Yuen Pak-leung, president of the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

Veteran engineer Yuen Pak-leung’s first-hand experience with two major public health crises has convinced him his profession is really about people, and finding solutions swiftly when challenges arise.

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The Hospital Authority veteran, elected president of the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (HKIE) this year, told the Post his attitude about his job was shaped by the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak of 2003.

Until then, Yuen saw himself as merely “a spectator” within the medical system, and was focused mainly on technical projects that came his way.

“The Sars crisis taught me that I was more than an engineer,” he said. “I learned I had to breathe together with the hospitals and consider myself part of the medical system.”

That epiphany helped him when the Covid-19 pandemic struck Hong Kong early this year and hospitals had to respond speedily to a ferocious new enemy.

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