How Covid has Been Handled in the UK Compared to Hong Kong

COVID-19 has been around for over a year now. There’s no doubt that governments around the world have handled this crisis very differently. Tracey Cuthbertson is a Headteacher at Woodlands International Pre-School in Repulse Bay, Hong Kong. She thinks the pandemic has been handled very differently by the government in Hong Kong, compared to the UK. Especially when it comes down to the education of children and pre-schoolers.

Tracey thinks the government were much faster when imposing restrictions in Hong Kong. She said: “They acted very fast, in that they closed things down quite quicky here.

“Specifically, when it comes to education, they closed down schools and they started from the youngest ones up.”

Hong Kong have had a very small number of Covid cases. They have reported a total of 9,721 cases since the start of the pandemic, as opposed to the UK who recently reported over 25,000 cases in one day.

Tracey thinks that there have been fewer cases of Covid in Hong Kong because of the culture of mask wearing in the country: “In Hong Kong, sometimes people wear masks anyway if they’re not feeling very well. It tends to be to support other people rather than ourselves, so once Covid came out, a lot of people were wearing masks.

“Of course, there was a lot of debate on whether or not masks were very good. What you’d find is that people from Hong Kong were all wearing masks, but the westerners weren’t because they were all listening to the World Health Organisation. People have been wearing masks here since January last year. 

“We have QR codes everywhere. This allows people to clock-in to a location and alert them if there has been a recent Covid outbreak at the location. Even on the ferries, workers walk up and down to check that you’re wearing your mask properly.”

Schools in Hong Kong have also been affected by Covid. In the UK, schools have been open for the majority of the pandemic as the government had deemed them “safe”. However, in Hong Kong, this is not the case. Tracey said: “We have been closed pretty much the whole time, apart from a window of about 2 months around September-October and then we had to close again. We’re still closed now.

“It’s only now that primary school children are going in for half a day per week. Other than that, everywhere is doing virtual classrooms so a lot of the children are doing zoom lessons for about 5 hours a day with teachers.

“For the little ones, we can offer emergency care here. It’s for people who don’t have someone to look after their child. These children can come to school, but we’re not actually allowed to teach these children.”

There has also been a huge amount of concern over the welfare and development of children and the impact this will have on them in the future. This is all because the schools have been closed due to the ongoing pandemic. She added: I think that there is a huge amount of worry around the wellbeing of children at the moment. It could be that there is lots of stress at home or parents could be losing jobs etc.

“We use a platform called Flipgrid, which allows teachers to post a video and the children can respond to it, which other children can also see and respond to. It’s about trying to make connections if they’re not at school.

“For us, we’ve had to make sure that we are very aware of our body language and tone because children mimic, they look to you for their learning and it’s important that we stay positive all the time.

“I understand that it’s okay not to be okay, but when you’re working with little ones, you need to show that you’re okay, because they need your support.”

Covid statistics in Hong Kong are also portrayed very differently than in the UK. Their website contains specific information regarding every individual Covid case recorded: “The data page is incredible. For each case, it tells you the persons gender, age, whether they’re asymptomatic and what building they’re in.”

Although Hong Kong has evidently been very swift with introducing lockdowns and safety measures, the vaccine rollout has not been as fast in comparison to the UK’s. Tracey explained: “We haven’t even started vaccines here, they are apparently ordered, but I’m hoping that they will roll it out to everybody soon.”

It’s clear that Covid has had a huge effect all around the globe, but why has the UK had so many more cases than Hong Kong? Would the total number of cases be lower if our government had acted faster when locking down and imposing restrictions?