Lam Drops Hotel Quarantine to 14 Days

Lam announces hotel quarantines will be reduced to 14 days

Today Hong Kong recorded a record 164 Covid-19 cases, the most logged in a single day since the pandemic began in January 2020. There is now a new cluster in Wong Tai Sin.

It was not surprising then that Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor announced that social-distancing measures would continue until February 17, while in-person classes will be suspended until February 21.

One bright spot was that travellers coming back to Hong Kong would only need to do hotel quarantine for two weeks and then one week at home starting from February 5. 

A record number of 164 cases logged today

The decision to shorten the quarantine period came after persistent complaints from travellers and companies paying high quarantine costs for employees.

Currently Hong Kong residents who return to Hong Kong must undergo quarantine for 21 days in designated hotels, while those arriving from countries with serious Covid issues like the United States must first quarantine for four days at Penny's Bay before completing the rest of the quarantine in a hotel.

Finally today a tycoon spoke out about the tough measures the government has implemented in a bid to have a "zero-Covid" goal, saying the restrictions were seriously impacting businesses. 

Ronnie Chan, chairman of Hang Lung Properties has read reports that the Omicron variant is much like the influenza, and should be treated as such.

"It seems Omicron is going in the direction of becoming flu-like. It is possible to consider how the policy needs to progress. There may be a need to study the possibility of a change," he said on Thursday.

Chan said the current zero-Covid policy would make sense if the virus caused a high percentage of deaths. He said an approach based on building herd immunity would be "fine" if the current wave of infections does prove similar to influenza.

Chan calls for easing of social-distancing 

Hang Lung is the first Hong Kong developer to openly call for a change in Covid-19 policy.

Chan said the city is "in a difficult situation". It is "stuck in the middle", between the need for people to cross the border with mainland China freely, and the desire to align with other countries.

"Of course, Hong Kong is a big international city. So we need to align with the world," he said. "The fact that the staff of big companies [have not been] able to return to Hong Kong without [undergoing a quarantine of] three weeks, is extremely difficult to accept in terms of commercial sense."

When will other tycoons start voicing their opinions as well? Surely they are tired of being stuck in their mansions on The Peak and want a chance of scenery like the rest of us?

Seems that Lam did listen to him and shorten the hotel quarantine time, but it is still 21 days for no specific scientific reason, when Omicron can be detected within the first few days.

In any event, the 15 days of Chinese New Year are completely cancelled, and Valentine's Day too.

The Year of the Tiger will not be off to a roaring start... will we have better news after the Winter Olympics are over?

One can only hope.

Review: Better Angels

The home in Muscatine, Iowa that Xi Jinping stayed in back in 1985

This evening I got to watch a preview of a documentary called Better Angels by two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Malcolm Clarke.

It's a strange title for a film about the relationship between the United States and China, but it's taken from a quote that Henry Kissinger says at the beginning, how better angels will make our future better.

So aside from the big names like Kissinger, former secretaries of state James Baker and Madeleine Albright, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and even former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, the documentary follows different, ordinary people on how the other country has affected them.

A picture of Xi (far right) in front of that Muscatine home

One is a teacher from Texas who goes to China to teach English and American football and is grateful for the opportunity to not only make money to support his family, but also learn more about the culture; another is a blind man who travels around the world and when he's in the US he wants to go to Muscatine, Iowa to visit the house that Chinese President Xi Jinping stayed in in 1985. It turns out another Chinese man bought the home and turns it into a "Friendship House".

There are sympathetic portraits of Chinese who oversee factories in the US and Ethiopia, and how they hardly get to visit their families, and how some Americans employed in these Chinese factories are so thrilled to have a job following the financial crisis in 2009.

One neat scene is watching a Chinese man showing American kids how to use an abacus and how it stimulates their interest in math. After a few lessons they turn into human calculators.

A teacher appreciates his life in China with his Chinese wife

The stories don't necessarily weave together nicely, but they each show a nuanced side of the Chinese or Americans. However, there are some heavy weights like Wanda's Wang Jianlin, who's filmed singing and the audience in the ballroom is cheering him on... this was obviously before the company got into trouble with the central government...

Clarke was at our screening and afterwards he explained the film took over three years to make and they had to re-edit the film following Donald Trump's election win. The British director also said he got all the big name people he wanted mostly because he would drop names of other people in there and so they didn't want to miss out in being in the documentary.

He's currently showing it to small audiences here and there, and there are plans to show Better Angels at the Asia Society in Hong Kong (maybe because chairman Ronnie Chan gets his say in the film?).

British director Malcolm Clarke

Clarke's strategy is to have a wider release in the US before showing it in China, where he had to get layers of approval; but because the film is practically positive about China -- and Xi -- that it got the green light. And Clarke is keen on making more films about the country because he finds it so fascinating -- good and bad.

Better Angels isn't for everyone, but for those interested in learning a bit more about China, this gives a more intimate view of how it impacts people at a grassroots level.