Returning to or leaving Hong Kong, once a non-event that made the island an ideal regional base for many international companies, has become extremely complicated, both for people and for goods. For lack of connections, air or sea, reliable or regular, even postal mail is no longer insured with many countries (including France, since January 11). Some stalls are beginning to empty in the fresh shelves of supermarkets, while the city imports 98% of its food. Online ordering times have gone from hours or days in the past to weeks or even months, with prices climbing in most sectors.
The most egregious restrictions have affected people first. For more than a year, the government has imposed the most drastic quarantines in the world on any visitor. From February 5, the arrival quarantine will be reduced by one week to last “only” two weeks, which it is however imperative to spend strictly locked up in a hotel room, at your own expense. Some travelers must also first stay a few days in a public quarantine camp where the living conditions leave something to be desired. And, since January 8, flights from eight countries (including France, the United States and the United Kingdom) have been banned, forcing people arriving from these countries to spend three weeks in a third country, such as Singapore or Dubai, before being able to fly to Hong Kong.
Public quarantine camps
This new stage of pre-quarantine already has a name for those who have to submit to it: the washingout, in a way, the “prior disinfection”, which will also be reduced by one week from February 5. Until then, it took six weeks at the hotel to come to Hong Kong, from France or other countries prohibited from direct flights. People returning to Hong Kong also run the risk, if their test is positive on arrival, of being forcibly hospitalized for at least ten days, and then isolated for at least fourteen days…
To these risks and inconveniences must be added the logistical headaches and the enormous associated costs. Additional obstacle, the pensum of booking flights, regularly canceled, and hotel rooms, exclusively in one of the hotels designated by the government. “I changed plane tickets four times. My hotel had told me that if I arrived more than twenty-four hours late on the reservation, it would be canceled and I would lose the three weeks paid”, affirms to World a businessman who had left Hong Kong “for three weeks” at the beginning of the summer and who ended up staying out of town for six months because of these complications.
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