Hong Kong is now facing its worst resurgent wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, with new infections staying at a triple-digit level for 12 consecutive days before declining to 80 cases on Monday. All indications are that Hong Kong is on the verge of a massive new outbreak which, if unchecked, will very likely trigger a collapse of our hospital system and cost even more lives in the process, particularly among our more vulnerable elderly population. Clearly some drastic steps need to be taken by our medical and health leaders to avert this imminent catastrophe. To put our challenges in perspective, and at the risk of oversimplification, I would like to differentiate the stakeholders into three broad categories:
The good.
Fortunately, we have many dedicated medical staff who have been giving their all while risking their own lives in the last six months to combat the virus. They are truly our unsung heroes, our debt to whom we can never fully repay.
Among them, Doctor Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the Centre for Health Protection’s Communicable Disease Branch, stands out. She appeared almost every day for the last six months to host the daily media briefing. She is particularly commendable for her calm disposition and clear communication despite being confronted with aggressive reporters who seem more interested in blackening the government than covering the evolving health crisis accurately.
There are also people in related sectors who have been most innovative in coming up with new face masks and digital equipment to assist in the fight against the pandemic. They reflect the innovative spirit and technical expertise of our younger generation.
Hong Kong should also thank a number of medical experts, such as Dr Chow Pak-chin, the former vice-president of the Hong Kong Medical Council, and Dr Lo Chung-mau, head of the University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital, for regularly speaking to the media to provide helpful medical advice to the residents and useful suggestions to the special administrative region government.
The bad.
However, Hong Kong people are furious with many bad apples in the public medical sector. They include those who called for or joined the first-ever medical staff strike on Feb 3 to 7. Some 370 public medical doctors and 900 nursing staff took part in the strike, which caused great confusion and left many patients in critical condition unattended. Though their actions endangered patients and thus were clearly irresponsible, the Hospital Authority has thus far not taken any disciplinary action against them.
As the crisis now stands, the assistance from the mainland is the only way Hong Kong can overcome this pandemic crisis in the foreseeable future, and revive our economy. Let us be grateful not just for their much-needed help, but remember that they are actually risking their lives to help us!
But what’s most unacceptable is that the Hospital Authority continues to tolerate those medical workers who openly display their anti-government and anti-police badges on their uniforms while on duty. In trying to promote their personal political stance, some of their actions verge on dereliction of duty. One particularly deplorable case involved a police officer who was stabbed in the shoulder while taking enforcement action during a street riot. He suffered a gaping wound and lost 1.5 liters of blood, representing one-third of a normal person’s total blood. Yet he was treated by the medical staff with hostility, with some wearing anti-police badges conspicuously on their medical uniforms. Despite suffering such a serious injury, the medical doctor in charge ordered his discharge on the following day. Such blatantly unprofessional conduct must be thoroughly investigated both by the Hospital Authority as well as by the Independent Commission Against Corruption for gross negligence, a possible offense of “misconduct in public office”.
The ugly.
The progress of our entire medical sector is sometimes being held back by those few senior medical practitioners with a hidden agenda who took every opportunity to belittle and promote hatred against both the central and Hong Kong governments. For example, Professor Yuen Kwok-yung condones calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus”, despite its racist overtone and after the term was officially rejected by the World Health Organization. In a recent interview with the BBC, he said China had indeed covered up the virus cases in the early stage. This is odd as he visited Wuhan on Jan 17, yet China had reported the virus outbreak to the WHO on Jan 3. He complained that the wet market he visited was already cleaned up at the time of his visit and accused China of destroying evidence at the “crime scene”. Nothing can be more absurd than that. Did he expect the wet market to stay as it was, making it an ideal virus-breeding and virus-spreading black spot? And why did he call the place a “crime scene” when it is but a medical issue? Or was he just trying to emulate the Western media’s usual Sinophobic portrayal of events and provide them with ammunition to attack China, his motherland?
To cope with the recent crisis, the most practical solution is to call for professional assistance from the mainland to address the human and testing resources shortage in Hong Kong. However, such suggestions were promptly shot down by several of our medical associations and staff unions claiming that the testing equipment used on the mainland is substandard. In fact, they have met the WHO’s requirements and proved to be effective in both the mainland and numerous countries. Instead, Dr Choi Kin, immediate past president of the Medical Council, proposed that the government should give a HK$3,000 ($387) coupon to each citizen to enable them to get the test done in local hospitals and laboratories. The truth is that the local hospitals and laboratories charge around HK$1,500 to 3,000 per test, whereas the test used on the mainland costs only HK$15. If the government were to follow the suggestion of the Medical Council, it would mean siphoning HK$22.5 billion in taxpayers’ money into the pockets of the private medical sector! What a devious self-serving idea!
They also strongly objected to having medical personnel from the mainland to make up for the immediate severe local shortage to fight COVID-19, insisting that the only acceptable way for mainland doctors and nurses to practice medicine in Hong Kong is for them to pass the local medical accreditation exams first. Such an obstructionist attitude from these local medical groups cannot hide their protectionism, which in practice, only prioritizes the income of the local medical profession over the welfare of Hong Kong people. Their continued reprehensible, self-centered mindset is all the more absurd when many medical teams from the mainland have already rendered much-welcomed assistance to various countries in fighting the pandemic. And none of them have demanded that they must pass their local medical accreditation exams first!
It should also be noted that these medical teams from the mainland would leave as soon as their mission is accomplished and they would not be staying on to snatch the local medical practitioners’ “iron rice bowls”! Their objection not only demonstrated their narrow-mindedness, but their lack of compassion and humanity.
Leung Chun-ying, a vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference National Committee and former Hong Kong chief executive, gave a good analogy in his Facebook page. “If a Hong Kong resident traveling on an international flight suddenly had a heart attack on the plane, and the only doctor on the plane is a mainland doctor, should the mainland doctor be invited to treat him, or he be asked to get a medical qualification from the Hong Kong Medical Council first?”
Grasping at straws, Dr Choi also cited the linguistic barrier as a reason not to have mainland medical practitioners in Hong Kong since they speak Putonghua. The absurdity of his argument is beyond belief since Hong Kong tourism relies heavily on mainlanders and many Hong Kong residents speak at least rudimentary Putonghua. In any case, if Dr Choi’s argument were to stand, then the Hospital Authority should not employ any foreign doctors.
Fortunately, Hong Kong still have some medical associations with a conscience. The Hong Kong Nursing Union and the Hong Kong Community Anti-Coronavirus Link, comprising various sectors in the city, have both proposed that the SAR government should ask the central government to send in a team of medical professionals and experts to help conduct nucleic acid tests on every resident and to assist in medical treatment as early as possible. This must be given unqualified immediate support by the government.
Firstly, with so many chains of infections developing and so many unknown sources, the only sensible thing to do is to conduct mass testing on all citizens to discover all the asymptomatic patients so as to cut off transmission chains in the community. This is also the proposal of Zhong Nanshan, a prominent mainland expert. However, the SAR government does not have the capacity to do that, but the mainland does. Wuhan and Beijing have the experience in testing about 10 million people in a short period of time. At present, the mainland has the capacity to conduct tests on 3.78 million people per day. In the Beijing case, 20 testing teams from 12 provinces were dispatched to Beijing with mobile laboratories and they processed 400,000 to 1 million residents per day, detecting a huge number of asymptomatic cases, which would have gone unnoticed as they infected others. This was the key factor in quickly curbing the virus spread in Beijing.
As for the concern about personal data breaches, a simple system can be devised in which all tests would be identified only by a bar code and the personal details kept by the Hospital Authority. The mainland laboratories would not know who the specimens belong to.
Secondly, the central government has already sent a team of experts to Hong Kong to help build a mobile cabin hospital of 2,000 beds for COVID-19 patients at AsiaWorld-Expo. Wuhan has the experience of building such a special-purpose hospital within a couple of days. But it would be impossible for the Hospital Authority to find adequate personnel to staff it in the short term. One simple solution is to let this mobile cabin hospital be staffed and managed entirely by mainland professionals. To ease some Hong Kong residents’ concerns, the mainland medical team can be placed under the leadership of Professor Lo of the University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital and his hospital staff.
As the crisis now stands, the assistance from the mainland is the only way Hong Kong can overcome this pandemic crisis in the foreseeable future, and revive our economy. Let us be grateful not just for their much-needed help, but remember that they are actually risking their lives to help us!
The author is an adjunct professor of HKU Space and a council member of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
