Hong Kong yesterday launched a mass COVID-19 testing scheme, but calls for millions to take up the offer have been undermined by deep distrust of the government following China’s crushing of the territory’s democracy movement.
The free voluntary tests are part of an attempt to stamp out a third wave of infections that began in late June and saw the densely populated territory reimpose economically painful social distancing measures.
However, the program has been hampered by a limited response due to the involvement of mainland Chinese testing firms and doctors — and swirling public fears of the harvesting of data and DNA as Beijing cracks down on calls for democratic reform.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Since registration began on Saturday, 510,000 people have signed up — about 7 percent of the territory’s 7.5 million population.
About 10,000 people were tested yesterday morning, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) said, including government ministers.
“It will help Hong Kong emerge from the pandemic unscathed and is conducive to the resumption of daily activities,” she told reporters.
However, health experts advising the government have said as many as 5 million people might need to be tested to comprehensively uncover hidden transmissions and end the current wave.
Hong Kong has recorded just more than 4,800 infections since the virus first hit the territory in late January, but about 75 percent of those cases were detected since the start of July.
“I am doing this for myself and for others,” Winnie Chan, a mother in her 30s, told reporters as she entered a test center. “I am confident and I support the government’s policy.”
Others said they had no plans to sign up.
“I think it’s a waste of time,” local resident Emily Li told reporters. “The government can’t convince me in terms of the effectiveness of the testing program.”
Authorities have billed the scheme as a benevolent public health initiative made possible with Chinese help.
However, the involvement of teams and labs from the mainland has sent the rumor mills into overdrive and compounded fears of Beijing’s surveillance state, which uses biometric data to monitor its citizens.
Some prominent Hong Kong health experts have questioned the efficacy of a mass testing program, arguing that more targeted monitoring of at-risk and vulnerable communities would be a better use of resources.
They have also raised concerns that the act of testing so many people might itself help spread the virus in a territory where emergency rules forbid more than two people gathering in public.
A group of pro-democracy politicians and lawmakers, including Joshua Wong (黃之鋒), have called on the public to boycott the test.
They voiced fears of mass DNA harvesting and concerns Hong Kong might introduce a mandatory health code system like those used on the mainland.
The Hong Kong government has repeatedly rejected those concerns, denying DNA would be taken and insisting that no tests would go to mainland labs.
Lam has slammed those opposed to the testing scheme as “active anti-Beijing, anti-government members” who “will not spare any chance to create troubles and stir up confrontations even when it comes to a public health issue.”
Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office called those opposed to testing “anti-China radicals” with a “vile disregard” for public health.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS