My Loss of Freedom Is Feeding Hong Kong’s Viral Economy
The city’s strict quarantine is driving a parallel economy, but it’s not enough to overturn its flailing fortunes.
When will the city’s isolation end?
Photographer: Chan Long Hei/BloombergThe warning from the hotel came at 5 p.m. on Friday. Half an hour later, my room door had been boarded up with crime-scene tape, a tripod-mounted camera placed just outside, surveilling the exit. “This is so you don’t try to escape,” the duty manager laughed as he explained the consequences of the Covid-19 test conducted on me a few hours earlier at the Hong Kong airport.
I was too dumbstruck to do a runner, and too jet-lagged to grasp the severity of what I was hearing. It seems I had tested positive upon my return that morning from a three-week vacation in the US. The health department would swoop in any time to take me out of the nice quarantine hotel that I was paying for to an isolation facility where the bill would get sent to taxpayers.