We had two years to prepare. To watch the world and learn. To strengthen our (already always severely creaking,) public health system. To support our healthcare workers. To protect our elderly and disabled residential care homes. To ensure our mortuary system had capacity. To prepare temporary facilities. To organise refrigerated lorries or containers.
We had a year to get our elderly vaccinated.
So what did we do?
We spent the whole time focussing on enveloping Hong Kong within an all-encompassing National Security Infrastructure, ensuring the deep penetration of control throughout every facet of society. We imported tens of thousands of Secret Police from the mainland, flooding and infiltrating every corner, surveilling, monitoring and reporting on every resident. All operating outside of and specifically exempted from all Hong Kong laws.
We arrested more than ten thousand protesters and jailed over a thousand (many thousands still await trial). Dozens of - entirely and always peaceful - academics, activists, broadcasters, politicians, artists, *professors, lawyers and barristers, journalists, poets, teachers, performers, reporters, media, publishers, trade unionists, social workers, etc.etc. - jailed without trial for over a year now. Over 60 civic organisations, unions, and NGO's - local and international - shuttered or fled overseas.
(Beginning to sound familiar yet? Distant bells ringing? Any echos?)
We arrested many dozens of doctors, nurses, paramedics, emergency workers, first aiders and first responders of every discipline. They were out on the streets, every day and night during the protests, volunteering, in their spare time, outside of their work in the public health system. They tended to the thousands of Hongkongers being battered and beaten and brutalised by an unfettered, paramilitary-police-force. Tens of thousands of unidentifiable, anonymous, tooled-up thugs, acting with completely impunity, unleashed on society with instructions to quell ANY dissent - no questions asked.
And we arrested the fucking medics! What was it again? Aiding and abetting a riot? Really? Are you fucking serious? Public health? Really?
And then we started building tens of thousands of cells in new prison camps and shipping-in many more thousands of mainlanders to staff them - all operating outside of and specifically exempt from all Hong Kong laws.
So, when the hugely-highly-transmissible BA.2 variant, inevitably, swept into and through the community, we were completely, wholly and totally unprepared.
And what happened?
COVID deaths over the last five days:
07/03/22 - 291.
08/03/22 - 291.
09/03/22 - 281.
10/03/22 - 294.
11/03/22 - 285.
We're currently culling our elderly, sick and vulnerable at the rate of 2,000 a week.
On a per capita basis, that's a higher death rate than any other country has ever suffered at any time throughout the entire pandemic - even those that currently have the highest overall per capita death rates!
Hospitals are crumbling. Every mortuary and morgue in Hong Kong is overflowing. Public services are creaking and floundering in every sector of society. The population is traumatised.
So, when the store rooms and offices and even fucking operating theatres at public hospitals are already stacked with cadavers, and when the elderly are still being triaged outdoors in alleyways, and when the bin-bags-full of medical waste are overflowing in the skips at waste disposal areas, and when the inevitable knock-on shock-waves of chaos are rippling throughout the whole system and then erupting at each choke point ...
What are we supposed to do with all the dead bodies?
Oh!
I know!
Let's store them in the COVID Accident and Emergency wards!
Just stack them around and in between all the elderly patients, gasping for breath on oxygen (running short!).
I mean, they're old anyway, right? And they're already very sick, right? Almost on their way out, right? They'll hardly notice at all, right? Will they? Nah!
The picture above and the two below, were taken at the Queen Elizabeth's Hospital (QEH) three or four days ago. Above is an operating theatre. Below is a COVID ward at the A&E Department. This is happening at all hospitals, throughout Hong Kong.
It must be incredibly comforting for these, very sick, elderly COVID patients in A&E to be surrounded by all these dead bodies.
Small mercies right?
Imagine the conversation:
"I can't breath. I'm frightened. Can anybody see the number on my bed please? I want to know where I am in the queue?"
In a largely Taoist society, still deeply imbued with a pious respect for the elderly and superstitious, ritualistic, customs around death and ancestors ... this is not going down well. At all. At all!
People are, rightly, angry.
This is the CCP.
This is Fascism.
Oh!
And I mentioned a couple of months ago to watch Ukraine.
Are you watching?
Personally, I blame the Nihilistic, Stasi, Arabic Watchmakers.
Blessings one and all - all and sundry.
Be nice to each other peeps.
Come dog. A cuddle before bed?
(EDIT: To add *professors, lawyers and barristers. There are so many more, so many more. Decades long friends, associates and fellow travellers - all gone. All gone! FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE [add your own category/identity]!)
Woof
