Hong Kong fiddles while the world moves on

THE reduction in Hong Kong’s mandatory hotel quarantine period to three days from seven will come as a welcome relief to many in a pandemic-weary population. Whether it will do much to revive the financial centre’s international competitiveness is far more doubtful. In a world where most of its rivals abandoned Covid curbs months ago, the city still looks like a global outlier stuck in a time warp.

It might seem churlish to gripe about a policy step that will have had many people cheering, particularly if they are returning to Hong Kong soon or currently planning a trip out. Three days is easier to bear than seven, which in turn is better than 14 — the required stay until April 1 this year — as well as being cheaper. The trouble is that retaining any quarantine period at all keeps travellers trapped in a morass of associated logistical headaches. Challenges include booking a quarantine hotel room and aligning it with a flight (your correspondent hasn’t left Hong Kong since December 2019, but voluminous anecdotes from relatives and friends attest that this can be difficult); getting a pre-flight PCR test from a certified laboratory (leading to a panicked stopover for one relative in Qatar, when his accreditation document was found to be lacking); and enduring three- or four-hour waits at the airport, which conceivably could worsen now if more are encouraged to travel.

It’s little surprise, then, that business groups responded negatively to Monday’s announcement. They have pushed the government for months to scrap quarantine requirements altogether. The British Chamber of Commerce said the relaxation was unlikely to lead to a broader revival in business and tourist travel. Its German counterpart pointed out that provisions allowing travellers who contracted Covid in Hong Kong to be sent to an isolation centre remained a disincentive. The city built its prosperity and hub role on openness and connectivity; it’s hard to see what Hong Kong’s value proposition is if it remains more difficult to travel to than almost anywhere else in the world.