Hong Kong does not have enough money to improve the hygiene and comfort of people dying in old age homes, it only has a very limited amount of cash to give out to those who have lost jobs and there is precious little to spare to save businesses that are going under.

However, there was enough cash – a mind boggling HK$530 million – to be thrown around for the almost totally pointless so-called universal virus testing scheme that ended up testing no more than a fifth of the population and revealed 32 virus carriers. The price of this revelation amounted to HKD16.5 million per person.

Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive in Name Only (CENO), who never misses a chance to patronize Hong Kong people, insisted that they were missing the point by focusing on this HKD16.5m figure. Apparently, the exercise was successful in many other ways. For example, it gave Hong Kong testing experience.

However, it did nothing of the kind because all the testing companies are Mainland based, including BGI, which is now involved in a patent infringement case that has forced it to withdraw products from the market.

But, never mind, Hong Kong is more than happy with BGI because the third-tier operatives who run the Hong Kong government are happy with anything coming from the Mainland.

They were also happy, no, more like positively joyful, to celebrate the fact that 570 Mainland experts had crossed the border to help Hong Kong out. Government officials jostled to get themselves in a group photograph with these fine folk.

Talking of government officials, the CENO forgot to mention that alongside the 6,000 medical staff mobilized to perform the testing, some 4,000 civil servants were also involved in this scheme.

Just think what could have been done if they had been mobilized for more useful purposes. Only a fraction of them would have been needed had the government followed mainstream medical advice which is not to waste resources on universal testing schemes but to concentrate testing on high risk groups and among people known to be infected.

Why then has Hong Kong wasted all this money? To find the answer requires going back to February when the CENO delivered a secret report to her bosses in Beijing, which was revealed by Apple Daily and never explicitly denied. In it she described the outbreak of the coronavirus as a “rare opportunity to reverse the situation”, after having been “attacked on all fronts” during the protests. She urged Beijing to give her the fullest support in tackling the pandemic to provide an “opportunity to reverse the situation”.

It is now clear that the Lam administration has seized upon the outbreak of the virus as a way of nullifying the protest movement, not least in using it as an excuse to ban street protests and postpone the Legco election but also to hammer home the narrative of Hong Kong’s dependence on the generosity of the Mainland in supporting the SAR in its hour of need.

The propaganda surrounding the assistance from the North provides eloquent testimony to how this panned out.

Predictably, anyone criticizing the testing program has been denounced by the CENO for having “political motives”. This is laughable, most immediately because in Hong Kong current tense political atmosphere people have good reason to consider political ramifications. More substantially however it was the CENO herself who seized on the pandemic as an opportunity to make political capital.

Just to be clear, what has saved Hong Kong from the worst ravages of the coronavirus has been the self-discipline and good sense of the people. It most certainly was not the result of a hapless government that was reluctant to close the border with the Mainland and too scared to even rescue local people from Wuhan until more or less all other evacuations had been completed. Moreover, let’s not forget its pathetic attempts at sourcing masks and other protective equipment as the virus took hold.

While the government was floundering and floundering badly back in February, here is what the CENO had to say: “I don’t want to particularly describe how well my Government has been doing, but certainly we are acting in accordance with a strategy which is to protect the safety and the health of Hong Kong.”

No doubt, in the CENO’s mind, the government is now doing even better!

(Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist, writer and broadcaster and runs companies in the food sector. He was the founding editor of ‘Eastern Express’ and founding publisher of ‘Spike’. In London he was an editor at The Observer and in Asia has worked for international publications including, the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, BBC, Asia Times and The Independent and, during Hong Kong’s 2019/20 protests, for the Sunday Times. He hosts a weekly television current affairs programme: The Pulse"

Vines' latest book Defying the Dragon – Hong Kong and the world’s largest dictatorship, will be published early next year by Hurst Publishing. He is the author of several books, including: Hong Kong: China’s New Colony, The Years of Living Dangerously - Asia from Crisis to the New Millennium, Market Panic and Food Gurus.)

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