Because of COVID, a lot of office workers are allowed to work from home to reduce exposure to infection and transmission. Schools are still shut and will continue to shut until mid March. (I still have to work, obviously. Healthcare workers can't work from office lol).
Instead of staying at home to avoid infections, folks are going out for barbecues and hiking.
I can't even fathom this stupidity. The work-from-home scheme is so people aren't congregating together in traffic and at work so we don't get massive community outbreaks. It isn't a holiday. You don't still continue to congregate in public just because you don't have to physically go into work!
On 24 Feb 2020, Carrie Lam announced due to the nCoV outbreak in South Korea, HK is closing its borders to all incoming travel from South Korea who are not native HK citizens.
There are currently 833 cases in South Korea.
There are over 77,000 cases in mainland China.
Our border to China remains wide open.
Our hospital computer system, for the past few weeks, has been linked to the immigration department. It shows if a patient has used their HK ID card to pass the border into mainland China at any point in the past two months. It is of some help given the tendencies for a lot of infected patients to tell bare-faced lies. However, there are still some pitfalls. It won't tell us if they used other documents e.g. passports to cross the border. It takes up to 24 hours to update, so in theory if the patient comes through the border and barrels straight into a hospital, the system won't tell us they literally just came from China. A law has come into effect where if a patient is caught lying about their travel history when attending for suspected nCoV, they are liable to a heavy fine and time in jail. It won't be reinforced, of course.
A lawyer from mainland has just come into HK completely bypassing the system and is not flagged up for his travel nor for the 14 day quarantine because he went to Macau first and then into HK via the bridge linking Macau and HK (which, by the way, is entirely toll-free just for the sake of the nCoV outbreak, for reasons unknown).