Government Officials Looking Busy

Mainland expert team (in maroon) seeing things done in HK

For days Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan Siu-chee was no where to be found, publicly that is.

She finally emerged today, apparently busy showing around a mainland epidemiological expert delegation on the third of their five-day trip here that was documented in a press release.

Chan promised tracking every confirmed case

They visited the Contact Tracing Office which is under the Department of Health, and then also the Environmental Protection Department where officials explained its work on environmental transmission of the virus within buildings, while the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department talked about the requirements for indoor ventilation systems in government buildings, and guidelines for improving air quality indoors.

But perhaps most surprising in the press release was Chan's declaration: "The Government is in a race against time with the highly transmissible Omicron mutant strain. In order to contain the epidemic, we have to trace the close contacts of every confirmed case as soon as possible and conduct environmental investigation rapidly."

Uh... does she know there are currently 30,525 active cases?

Meanwhile her colleague Secretary for Labour and Welfare Law Chi-kwong is upset that Hong Kong residents were crowdfunding to help pay for the fines that foreign domestic helpers were getting from the police for allegedly not social-distancing to two people in public spaces. Last Sunday it was reported 17 fines of HK$5,000 each were handed out.

Police swarming domestic helpers at Tamar

The crowd-funding page had received over HK$100,000, but Law said he would ask the Justice Department to look into whether legal action needed to be taken.

"You may have good intentions, but we can't rule out that you are maliciously obstructing our whole anti-epidemic effort. Because you are helping a big group of foreign domestic workers to congregate, to violate the gathering limit, [this] will affect the epidemic, and affect many families," he said. "We must not be soft on this."

Definitely. As his boss Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said, "No mercy".

As a result, the organiser of the crowd-funding page had to stop accepting donations.

"Upon advice, we have decided that we should not proceed to pay the fines of the group of domestic helpers who received fixed penalties on Sunday, 13 February 2022, and have closed the fund. All sums collected will be returned to the original donors through the website."

Today there were 6,063 cases recorded, and 15 deaths with the age range between 45 to 93 years old, and only about two were vaccinated.

C'mon people! Free protection right here!

Another statistic that might persuade people to finally get vaccinated: in this fifth wave there have been 46 deaths so far. Of those, 40 were not vaccinated. Of those who were jabbed, three who died had had two doses of Sinovac, two had one dose of Sinovac, and one had two doses of BioNTech.

Why doesn't the Centre for Health Protection emphasise this to prove the point that people need to get vaccinated?!