Our Chief Executive Carrie Lam has officially announced everyone who comes through our borders who are not permanent residents will have their entries denied.

So, she is closing the border.

Which is what we medics striked to achieve (one of them, anyway) a month ago.

At that time, she accused us of being selfish and using the public's lives as collateral, of being extreme, and that the situation was too far gone for border-closing to have any significant effect anyway. And now she claims shutting the border is 'after listening to experts' advice'. I guess medical professionals aren't experts when it comes to deadly infectious diseases.

She has also banned the sale of alcohol because alcohol makes people drunk and therefore intimate and they get up to hanky-pankies. Which spreads nCoV. But shops that sell other stuff alongside alcohol like convenience stores are fine, though. I feel like I'm in some sort of Victorian dystopia. I cannot believe government higher-ups think banning alcohol sales is the best way to reduce social contact. How many brain cells do they share?!

Meanwhile, another man attends a hospital with a cough and a fever. After he has his sample taken, he goes to the hospital canteen. Shortly after, he is diagnosed as nCoV positive. This is a second hospital. That hospital canteen is now, also, closed down.

With this second wave of potentially infected HK ID holders flooding back, we see spikes in new cases up to 30-40 per day. Until this point, we had single digits of new cases per day. Over 400 people have breached their quarantine orders. They got warning letters. And that was it. Meanwhile, Taiwan fines a man 33k USD for breaching his quarantine order.

A group of young people went out for dinner; one of the young people had literally gotten off their flight from Europe within a few days prior. He had a fever. He broke his quarantine. He was taken by police to the hospital, pending nCoV testing.

I cannot stress this enough. If people die as a result of you prioritising your social life and your so-called rights to spread disease, it is your fault they die. COMPLETELY. YOUR. FAULT. YOU KILLED THEM. I only wish it were you breaking the bad news to the family that your selfishness killed their loved one. That it could have been avoided. And you can try and justify to them why your demands meant more than that life (or those lives).

Meanwhile, in the UK, doctors and other frontline staff are told they don't need to wear masks in the hospital. Senior managers tell them they only need a simple face mask -- which does not filter out virus particles in the air -- and a (teeny tiny super thin) plastic apron to treat confirmed nCoV cases. nCoV is spread by droplets in the air. In HK and many eastern countries / cities, we wear full N95 (a super tight filtered mask), face shield, full gown, and gloves for suspected or confirmed cases. What the UK is offering as PPE (personal protective equipment, i.e. equipment that is meant to protect the worker from getting infected) for the frontline workers is not enough. My colleagues and I in the east are absolutely aghast at the horrifically wrong advice and my colleagues from the UK are well aware, but there is nothing they can do. They are not given adequate PPE and senior management is deliberately giving wrong advice, but they aren't the ones on the frontline. They won't be the ones getting sick from their patients. They aren't the ones dying in the line of work.

I'm so insanely mad I can barely type coherently.

Edit: I pulled up some images from the internet to help visual comparison.

This is a Hong Kong healthcare worker in full PPE. It consists of (from the top to bottom) a cap covering the head; a face shield to block any sprayed fluids and particles; a N95 face mask to block particles from going in or out; a surgical gown that goes all the way around the body; and gloves. We wear this when treating any suspected or confirmed nCoV cases.

This is a UK healthcare worker in their "full PPE". It consists of (from the top to bottom) a normal surgical face mask that allows air to pass in and out freely at the sides and at the top and bottom; a flimsy thin cling-film-like plastic apron that only barely covers the front; and plastic gloves. They wear this when treating confirmed nCoV cases.