Shirley Leung, 60, woke up to find herself trapped in her Home by the first “grounding order” issued in Hong Kong due to the Communist virus outbreak. She scanned the small room where she lived with her adult son, which contained only a single bed, a few cardboard boxes and a plastic bin for her clothes.
She tried not to think about the smell coming from the moldy roof and walls. She divides the Family‘s fresh vegetables into daily portions and expresses her dissatisfaction with the canned Food and instant noodles that the government gave out after the “foot ban” was imposed last Saturday. She thinks about the overcrowded and interconnected state of the apartment building she lives in.
“If people in one room are infected, how can people living in sub-divided units not be infected?” Ms. Leung said in a telephone interview. “How can this building be safe?”
Hong Kong has long had one of the largest disparities between rich and poor in the world. In the city, trendy luxury shopping malls sit next to overcrowded low-rent apartment buildings, and in some of them, the bathrooms sometimes double as kitchens. In normal times, this inequality is often masked by Hong Kong’s glamorous facade. But during the Communist virus pandemic, the cost of this inequality has been exposed.
Since January 1 of this year until last weekend, about 1,100 cases of CCP virus infection have been confirmed in Hong Kong, more than 160 of them in and around Jordan. The government responded by cordoning off 16 neighborhoods where 10,000 residents live. more than 3,000 staff, many of them in head-to-toe protective clothing, swooped into residential areas to conduct mass virus tests on residents.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said last Tuesday that the closures had been a success and said more neighborhoods might be closed; shortly afterward, officials announced a “no-footing order” for the nearby Yau Ma Tei area as well.
Officials said that the dilapidated living conditions of many residents in Jordan have contributed to the spread of the virus. The densely populated Jordan neighborhood is known for its lively night market, old high-rise apartments, and wide variety of restaurants. The Jordan neighborhood has the highest density of low-cost apartment buildings in Hong Kong, where the original apartments in the building are separated into two or more smaller subdivisions.
More than 200,000 of Hong Kong’s poorest residents live in these apartments, with less than 4.5 square meters of living space per person, less than a third of the size of a parking space in New York City. Some living spaces are so small that people call them cages or coffins.
This environment, which could lead to an outbreak, also was particularly distressing for many of the grounded residents, who feared the consequences of not going to work for a day or being trapped in a poorly ventilated environment that was more conducive to the spread of the virus. Officials admit that they don’t know the exact number of people living in such compartmentalized apartments, which makes testing everyone for the virus more complicated. Discrimination against low-income South Asian residents, many of whom live in the Jordan district, has also raised questions.
Some have accused the government of first allowing conditions that led to the worsening of the Epidemic to emerge, and then imposing callous measures on the least able groups. There have been outbreaks in communities where Hong Kong’s wealthy are located, and some have openly flouted rules about keeping social distance, but the government has never locked down wealthy communities.
“If they’ve done anything wrong, it’s that they’re poor, they live in subdivided flats, or they have a different skin color,” said Yu Tak-po, an elected district council member from the blocked community.
The subdivided units have been a concern since the communist virus pandemic.
Ms. Leung, who is retired, and her son have only one bed, and she sleeps in it at night while her son sleeps in it during the day and works the night shift at a construction site. Ms. Leung said a beam has cracked, but the landlord has been slow to fix it. Mold is also an age-old problem, as dirty water constantly leaks down from neighboring units.
Plumbing systems in subdivided units are often refitted to connect to more toilets or kitchens, but problems with the quality of the refitting are common. During the SARS epidemic of 2002 to 2003, the virus had spread through faulty plumbing systems, resulting in more than 300 people infected with the virus and 42 deaths in one residential area.
The government had promised reforms after SARS, but acknowledged that the situation remained dangerous.
“The buildings in the restricted areas are older and in disrepair,” Hong Kong’s Secretary for Food and health Chan Siu-chee said on Saturday. “The risk of infection in the community is very high.”
The zone closure, which ultimately lasted only two days, ended at midnight Sunday, and the government said it had successfully tested most residents in the area for the virus. 13 people tested positive.
But experts say the government has not addressed the underlying problem.
Wong Hung, deputy director of the Institute for Health Equity at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the government has not been doing enough to regulate subdivided flats.
“They are worried that if action is taken, these low-income families will have no place to live,” Wong Hung said. Housing in Hong Kong has been among the most unaffordable in the global real estate market.
Income inequality in Hong Kong is also intertwined with ethnicity, and the epidemic has exacerbated long-standing discrimination against South Asian residents, who make up about 1 percent of Hong Kong’s population. According to government statistics, nearly one-third of South Asian families with children in Hong Kong live below the poverty line, twice the proportion of all Hong Kong families living below the poverty line.
Many South Asian residents live in and around Jordan, including in subdivided units, and as the virus spreads, some locals have begun to generalize and accuse South Asians of unhygienic habits.
Hong Kong’s senior health official, Richard Ho, stirred outrage last week when he suggested that Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities had contributed to the spread of the virus because “they like to share food, smoke and drink and talk. (Hong Kong SAR leader Carrie Lam later said the government was not suggesting the spread of the disease was linked to ethnicity.)
Sushil Newa, the owner of a brightly painted Nepali restaurant in the blocked neighborhood, showed an online video of the disease saved on his phone. He showed screenshots of online comments saved on his phone comparing his community to animals and also implying that Nepalis are alcoholics.
“We just work hard and pay taxes here, so why are we segregated by Hong Kong?” Newar asked in reference to the discrimination, as an employee at the restaurant was scooping up take-out Boyani stew.
The government has also failed to communicate effectively with South Asian residents, leading to confusion about the sealed zone, Wong Hung said. (The government later said it had sent interpreters to the district.) Other residents said the government provided culturally inappropriate food, such as serving pork to Muslims.
Nonetheless, Newar said he supports the restrictions on movement. Although he lost money, he said, controlling the outbreak was more important.
Other owners agreed, but also asked the government to compensate them.
Low Hung-kau, owner of the corner stall “Shanghai Cuisine,” said he had to throw away ingredients for his dumplings, adding to the decline in business since the outbreak.
“I lost 60 percent of my business,” he said. “Almost no one came in.”
He spent the second day of the closure rallying nearby property owners to call the government and demand compensation for at least some of the damage caused by the weekend closure. Government officials sidestepped questions about compensation, saying only that they hoped employers would not dock the wages of employees who failed to show up for work.
Activists have been critical of the government’s relief efforts during the New Coronavirus pandemic, pointing out that the government did not provide unemployment benefits. In addition, many of the government’s benefits are targeted at employers, not employees. Some companies have applied for subsidies to keep employees in their positions, but then failed to do so as promised.
Some people have no choice but to go to work during the movement restrictions, despite the risks involved in doing so.
Ho Lai-ha (Ho Lai-ha, phonetic), a 71-year-old street cleaner, said she had finished sweeping roads and cleaning sewers over the weekend, just days after the government had listed them as potential sources of infection.
“I was a little scared, but there was nothing else I could do,” she said Monday while dipping a mop into an open-covered sewer. “The area is closed, but we still have to work.”
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