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Thanks for that. Very interesting.
Earlier this week an 11 month old baby was separated from its mother because the child was positive and the mother was not, this is an increasingly common story on the quarantine support facebook group, although that is the youngest i have seen, normally it’s primary school children not baby or toddler age.
This is horrible. What utter nonsense, the poor kids. I mean, the parents, too, but in the kids it may well cause lasting trauma.
Oliver Schick
The kept the virus out very well for such a long time that people, especially the elderly didn’t get vaccinated. This was fine while they rode the knife edge of zero covid through a tough border then two things happened at the same time.
Delta came in through infected hamsters, looks like the virus can be transmitted through fecal matter and a hamster drags its arse over your skin when you handle it.
A member of cabin crew broke the home isolation rules after coming off an international shift and went to a restaurant just after Christmas, this gave omicron to a few people before they got hold of the infection chains during the holidays when a lot of going out was happening. Then we got to CNY and it has exploded.
Because of the high density housing, crap sewage (people get infected through sewage pipes from neighbours venting into their apartment), combined with a blanket refusal to do anything the government says and people are running around.
Of course the biggest factor for me was the consequences of being positive, if you came forward as positive you got sent to hospital for minimum 24 days, your friends and family got sent to quarantine camps for 21 days. The facilities filled up very quickly when HK fell off the zero covid knife edge but before they did a lot of people who suspected they had it stayed at home for fear of quarantine and it spread through the sewer venting mentioned above.
They test the sewage and do overnight lockdowns to mass screen all residents, one block with a few thousand residents had hundreds of cases and the block was locked down for a week. Even then there were pictures of crowds queueing for their daily test with no distancing at all.
Now the hospitals are full so people wait a week at home with a positive diagnosis, the quarantine camps are being used for positive cases so close contacts are no longer being isolated. People still do not come forward with symptoms and there is an underground campaign encouraging people to go to blue shops and restaurants if they think they have COVID, a last act of defiance.
A maintenance worker at our block tested positive on a lateral flow test one afternoon, he then needed to go to a community test centre for a pcr, he went first thing the next day, a day later the result came back as preliminary positive so the sample was sent to a government lab for confirmation, the lab had a backlog so he wasn’t confirmed for a few more days. By the time he had his positive result it was about 4 or 5 days after his LFT (or Rapid Antigen Test “RAT”). Until his confirmed positive he was under no requirement to isolate and was not eligible for sick pay. There are calls for the government to accept pcr results from the community testing centres without needing to validate all positive cases and even accept RAT tests.
Now Beijing it’s running the response, they are building mass isolation sites (remember everyone marvelling at how quickly they build these isolation hospitals, well they generally have exposed wires, leaky pipes and start to fall apart as soon as the photo op is over). All parks, school fields, set aside development land is in scope for a isolation camp and a full lockdown is only days away. Schools are having summer break in March and April so those sites can be used as mass test centres and isolation wards so the knock on the door will be returning and people carted off in the middle of the night for weeks of isolation.
Earlier this week an 11 month old baby was separated from its mother because the child was positive and the mother was not, this is an increasingly common story on the quarantine support facebook group, although that is the youngest i have seen, normally it’s primary school children not baby or toddler age.
Since the school closures and return of the threat of quarantines there is another push for people to exodus HK, flights doubled in price this week and as of Tuesday you can fly via Singapore to the U.K. without any pre-departure tests so if you think you (or your kids) have it and can afford the ticket, get a ticket not a test is the mantra.
Tldr, they fell off the knife edge of zero covid, just like AUS and NZ, when they did they didn’t have a good enough vaccination rate. The structures the have for dealing with positive cases incentivise people not to come forward when they suspect they have it.