Hong Kong urged to scrap hotel quarantine for arrivals

Calls are growing for Hong Kong to scrap its requirement for all arrivals in the city to undergo a seven-day hotel quarantine.

The international financial hub is "obviously falling behind" as the rest of the world reopens after more than two years of the coronavirus pandemic, Cathay Pacific chairman Patrick Healy warned at the flagship airline's annual general meeting last Wednesday.

Business chambers are lobbying the government to end the stringent quarantine requirement as business travellers shun the city and more expatriates choose to relocate after prolonged periods of being forced to stay apart from their families abroad.

The recent death of veteran actor Kenneth Tsang, 86, in a quarantine hotel, also turned the spotlight on the measure, with the authorities revealing earlier this month that at least five people had died in quarantine since December 2020.

For Mr C. H. Chong, an executive at a multinational corporation in Hong Kong, the travel quarantine is the main reason he has decided to look into relocating his family after a decade in the city he has grown to love.

"What really hit home was when our children, who were in universities overseas, couldn't return to Hong Kong for the past one year, and I even had to miss one child's graduation," said the Singaporean, who is a Hong Kong permanent resident, expressing his disappointment at missing the graduation ceremony he had looked forward to.

Hong Kong's borders have been largely shut to the rest of the world since the pandemic began.

At one point, it instituted a 21-day hotel quarantine on the few allowed to enter, which was gradually lowered to seven days last month after its fifth and worst wave of Covid-19 started to ease.

Although the city started welcoming back non-residents this month, it continues to impose flight bans on airlines found to be carrying infected passengers, and also requires strict Covid-19 tests upon arrival. All these measures add to the costs and uncertainty of travel to the city.

Until last month, the authorities had also barred all flights from nine countries, including Britain and the United States, where Mr Chong's children are studying.

For Mr Chong, the combination of his work demands, his children's school requirements and the uncertainty of travel back to Hong Kong made it all but impossible for his family to plan reunions over the course of the pandemic.

Fed up with being kept apart from his children for so long while the rest of the world has been gradually reopening, he is looking to relocate, with Singapore as one of the options.

"I like Hong Kong very much, so I think I've already been quite tolerant of all these Covid-19 measures," he said.

"At first, it was the right thing to do. But now, with the science and vaccinations, I'm not worried about getting infected… When the whole world was still closed, it wasn't so bad. But now, I do need to travel again, and being stuck here and subjected to lengthy unreasonable quarantines is really starting to affect us.

"I'm not happy with the situation."