The first case of confirmed death from nCOV was announced on 11th January, 2020. On 22nd January, over 500 cases were confirmed and 17 people died from the virus.

At that point, cases have been reported across the world, including Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and the USA.

CCP (the Chinese Communist Party) imposed a lockdown on the city of Wuhan. The problem was they announced the lockdown. There was an eight-hour gap from the announcement to the actual lockdown, during which (according to the Wuhan mayor) an estimated 5 million citizens (out of a total population of 11 million!) had already fled the city.

For Hong Kong (HK)? Our border remains open. As long as one can get a travel permit, which is almost always granted, any mainlander (that is, anyone from China, not Hong Kong / Macau / Taiwan) can access HK. Prior to this, we had hundreds of thousands of mainlanders visiting HK daily. Our border was not, and still is not, shutdown. These daily influxes of people include the high speed rail with a direct route to Hong Kong.

A few weeks back, HK government made an announcement that there is no need to shut down the high speed rail. That same week, eight of the nine confirmed nCoV cases in HK were found to have travelled to HK from Wuhan via the high speed rail.

Earlier this week, the high speed rail was finally halted after much press attention and protesting. However, this was the only part of the border that was shut. Shutting the high speed rail only shuts 7.6% of the influx from mainland.

Macau and Italy have already banned Chinese passport-holders from crossing their border. Macau had no new confirmed cases of nCoV in the 5 days following their ban. HK still has almost all of her border open. When asked why, when faced with this outbreak in the most densely-populated city in the world and with the memory of SARS so fresh on everyone's minds, the border is not shut for infection control purposes (even temporarily), our chief executive (equivalent of mayor or president) Carrie Lam states such action would be "discriminatory" to mainlanders.

In the same breath, Carrie Lam announces every mainlander who is admitted to a HK hospital due to nCOV (suspected or confirmed) do not have to pay hospital fees. Normally, mainlanders (and all foreigners) pay 5k HKD (approx 500 USD) per day for a general ward hospital stay. Locals pay $120 HKD (approx 12 USD) per day. Local people still have to pay but mainlanders get fees waived at the expense of our tax money.

It's not discrimination to shut down the border until we can control the infection.

It's not discrimination to hold off vectors of disease.

It's not discrimination to stop mainlanders from crashing through our borders to use our already-stretched-impossibly-thin healthcare resources all expenses paid when they haven't paid a cent in taxes in their entire lives, when we can't even look after our own.

It's survival.

There was a huge backlash about using our taxes to fund potentially infected mainlanders rushing our borders to use our healthcare resources. Carrie Lam withdrew that statement a few days later.

The border remains open still at the time of this chapter.