The rapid, intensive coronavirus screening at its airport is a crucial component of Hong Kong's strategy to suppress the pandemic. ssataline reports
Photo: China News Service via Getty Ima Since March, the several hundred people who arrive on the scarce flights that land at Hong Kong International Airport shuffle through a gauntlet of digital apps, paper forms, tracking bracelets, temperature-gun readouts, shuttle-bus caravans, and line upon line until they step into tiny cubicles at the cavernous AsiaWorld-Expo. There, they hover over plastic vials, clear their throats, and spit — under penalty of imprisonment.
With many flights canceled and visitors barred from entering Hong Kong, just 1,210 people were tested at the airport by June, a fraction of the passengers that normally move under the terminals’ vaulted, curved ceilings. This is boutique health care, and skeptics wonder if the city can reopen this year to handle thousands, let alone millions, of arrivals.
Hong Kong’s bright and airy airport is normally one of the world’s busiest, with more than 71 million passengers last year, even amid incessant, sometimes dangerous democracy protests. The city’s respected tribe of epidemiologists — several of whom were seasoned by the 2003 SARS epidemic — worried that the city’s hospitals this year could not safely host arriving travelers without risking a mass outbreak.
There, with their wristbands secure, Burton and his son walked the perimeter of their room as instructed, creating what he called a virtual fence for the GPS and Bluetooth chips he assumed were inside the band. Periodically, his phone pinged when it couldn’t sync with the wristwear. On those occasions, Burton manually scanned the QR codes with the band.
Travelers who arrived from nations deemed at special risk — among those India, Pakistan, South Africa, and, recently, the United States — were whisked to government quarantine centers immediately after their spit test. South African Andrew Evans, a pilot for Cathay Pacific, was assigned to the Junior Police Call Permanent Activity Centre and Integrated Youth Training Camp, a boot camp near the border with Mainland China.
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