Hong Kongers yesterday stripped shop shelves bare as panic buying set in following mixed messaging from the government over whether it plans a China-style hard lockdown this month.
Uncertainty over COVID-19 rules has sent the territory’s residents flocking to supermarkets, chemists and vegetable stores to stock up, leaving shelves empty across the territory.
Photographs circulating on social media showed people had trouble finding a variety of items, including meat, vegetables, frozen foods, noodles, paracetamol and COVID-19 testing kits.
Photo: AFP
“We are like ants going home, grabbing a bit at one spot at a time,” a woman, who gave her surname Wu, said in a supermarket where most vegetables and meat had been snapped up.
Hong Kong is in the grips of its worst COVID-19 outbreak, registering tens of thousands of new cases each day, overwhelming hospitals and shattering its “zero Covid” strategy.
Authorities plan to test all 7.4 million residents this month and isolate all positive cases either at home or in a series of camps that are still being constructed with the help of China.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) had initially ruled out a Chinese-style lockdown where people are confined to their homes during the testing period.
However, Hong Kong Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan (陳肇始) on Monday confirmed it was still on the table, a day after a senior Chinese health official described it as the best option.
Multiple Hong Kong media, including HK01, Singtao and the South China Morning Post, yesterday cited sources as saying that authorities were planning a variety of lockdown options for the test period.
The South China Morning Post said that the favored option at present was a nine-day “large-scale lockdown,” where most residents would only be allowed out to by food.
One of the most densely populated cities on Earth, Hong Kong’s supermarkets have limited backroom storage space and saw waves of panic buying at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago.
Hong Kong apartments are also some of the smallest in the world, leaving little space to stock up.
The vast majority of HongKong’s food is imported from China and the current supply crunch has been worsened by cross-border truckers getting infected by the highly transmissible Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.
More than 190,000 infections have been recorded in the past two months, compared with just 12,000 for the rest of the pandemic.
The government released a statement late on Monday saying that food supplies remained constant and that there was no need for panic buying.
“You don’t need to worry about food and other necessities, Hong Kong has sufficient goods and material reserve,” Hong Kong Chief Secretary John Lee (李家超) told reporters as he presided over the opening of a 3,900 bed isolation facility where mild cases would be treated.
However, analysts said uncertainty and distrust were fueling consumer habits.
“We have so many questions, but all answers are ‘to be confirmed,’” Chan Ka-lok, an international politics scholar at Baptist University, wrote on social media. “Rush to buy and stock up, let the people decide how to live their life.”
Tom Grundy, editor of the Hong Kong Free Press news Web site, wrote on Twitter that the panic buying was the result of “a massive failure of gov’t communications.”
“Rules changing every few days, u-turns, botched stats, poor data disclosure,” he wrote.
It is not yet clear when testing would take place or what the government plans to do with all the cases it discovers.
About 70,000 isolation units for mild cases are due to come online in the next few weeks, in requisitioned hotels, public housing units and camps being built with Chinese help.
That would cover roughly two days of infections at Hong Kong’s current official caseload.
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