CHAIRMAN'S MESSAGE Dear Members I am writing this month’s statement from the isolated comfort of my quarantine hotel room. After an absence of 11 weeks, covering Christmas and New Year in the UK, I am on the last lap. When I left in December I expected to be back in Hong Kong by mid-January. But the twists and turns of COVID variants (combined with flight suspensions and a “wash-out”) have only gone to prove the adage that “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang oft a-gley”. Those of you who have completed some form of quarantine will know that the evenings and weekends are a vacuum filled with endless hours watching all sorts of nonsense on TV.
Kong of some 72,400 people in the month of February (95,000 departures and 22,600 arrivals)
“Quarantiners” have, for a few weeks only, an entirely defensible excuse to binge watch all those Netflix and Amazon Prime dramas that we otherwise only hear about from our teenage children.
From my quarantine room I have tried to stay as close to the situation as possible by speaking to members, engaging with my friends and my colleagues and attempting to answer the question whether we are experiencing a systemic change or a temporary moment of anxiety.
This time has been different. I have been unable to turn my eyes away from the news channels. The local Hong Kong ones have been filled with reports of the unfolding COVID crisis and the Government response. The international ones have been pretty much dedicated to the terrible events in Ukraine. I have sat, surreally, in the cossetted surroundings of my hotel room, with a supply of brown paper bags delivering me breakfast, lunch and dinner and I have started to become concerned. A fortnight’s isolation in a crisis with unlimited access to TV news and too much food is really not good for either the mental or physical well-being. Just the rumours of tougher restrictions and isolations are having a material impact on business activity and at the same time causing a number of people – expats and Hong Kongers – to move away from the SAR, perhaps for an extended but temporary period, perhaps permanently. Economists’ GDP growth forecasts have been adjusted downwards and the international border crossing statistics are not encouraging. There has been a net exit from Hong xx
Of course this is a cause for concern in the Chamber.
One of the problems is that Hong Kong’s current COVID case load and the heavy pressures on the healthcare system are being experienced for the first time. The rest of the world went through this phase of pandemic management some two years ago. We can all recall events from around the world in 2020: the harrowing scenes which began to emerge from Wuhan in January; the collapsing healthcare system in northern Italy in March; the lockdown for the winter and most of the spring in the UK, including the hospitalisation of the Prime Minister; the utterly fatigued faces of the healthcare workers in New York overwhelmed by the ambulances of sick and dying delivered to A&E. Hong Kong never went through any of this. The second problem is that whilst Hong Kong seems to be taking a step back into the winter of 2020, the rest of the world is moving forward into the spring of 2022 and developing ways of ‘Living with COVID’. The rest of the world is ditching quarantine, PCR tests on arrival and isolation arrangements, Hong Kong is imposing some of the strictest versions we have seen so far. An asymmetry of COVID measures has emerged as a result.
