Hallucinatory glimpse into life as it is with positive test in Hong Kong: “At least a month of incarceration without any perspective” | Abroad

Read everything about the coronavirus in this file.

On December 19, Chan flew from London to Hong Kong to start a new job. The young man was fully vaccinated and had already received his booster. In addition, he had tested negative several times before starting his long journey. Chan was mentally prepared for a quarantine, but not for what would come next.

On arrival in Hong Kong, Chan took a mandatory Covid test and then waited for hours at the airport. His result was “positive for now”, which meant he had to take another test. He was then transferred to a secluded area with a makeshift bed.

“It was a shock in a way,” Chan told CNN. “After doing so many tests in the week leading up to my flight – and they were all negative, by the way – I never thought I would test really positive upon arrival.”

About 13 hours after his plane landed, Chan was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital for further examination. He was later confirmed to have the omikron variant, although he showed no symptoms.

“I felt anxious and thought, ‘Oh, God, what’s going to happen now?’” he said. “I felt like a prisoner because you can’t just say, ‘I’m getting back on a flight and going somewhere else.’ You’re really just locked up there, so that was quite a scary feeling.”

Upon arrival at the hospital, Chan was placed in an isolation ward with two other travelers who also tested positive for omikron. He is locked in his room 24 hours a day with no fresh air or outdoor activities.

His day follows a routine established by the hospital. At 8 am he is awakened by an automatic jingle. He gets meals from the hospital at fixed times. In the meantime, he spends his day scrolling through social media and watching Netflix. “I’d say the afternoon is probably the hardest time of the day,” he says. “In the morning you check your emails or social media. But by the time lunch starts, you’re like, ‘I don’t really know what I’m going to do anymore’.”

Although he says his doctors are professional, they can’t tell him when he will be released from the hospital. “It all depends on when I stop testing positive, and then they start counting down,” Chan said.

According to Hong Kong authorities, the minimum period of isolation for anyone who tests positive for the coronavirus – even without symptoms – is almost a month. They must stay in the hospital for a minimum of 10 days and not be allowed to leave until they test negative twice in a row – however long it takes.

But even testing negative twice in a row doesn’t necessarily mean you can go home. After that, those ‘under detention order’ are transferred to a lockdown facility for another 14 days.

While New Zealand and Singapore have already moved away from a zero Covid strategy, Hong Kong, along with the rest of China, are stubbornly sticking to it. Any outbreak is nipped in the bud with draconian measures.

But it is not only travelers who are hospitalized indefinitely when they test positive for Covid-19. In the past few days, authorities have identified a number of over-the-air crashes involving an aircraft crew. This broke a streak of almost three months without locally transmitted Covid infections. Meanwhile, hundreds of people, including more than 20 restaurant workers believed to have been in close contact with the positive cases, have been sent to a quarantine facility for 21 days of isolation and extensive testing. Any positive result would mean a transfer to the hospital.

Anyone who has been in the same building at about the same time as the positive cases in recent days will also be required to take a test, while several housing units linked to the cluster have been temporarily closed for mass testing.

Since the start of the pandemic, Hong Kong has had more than 12,600 confirmed cases and 213 deaths, according to government figures — far fewer than many cities of similar size elsewhere in the world.

Despite the megacity’s success in keeping Covid-19 at bay, experts say extended quarantine often comes at the expense of the mental health of those incarcerated. “In general, there is an increased sense of anxiety and in some severe cases even post-traumatic stress,” said Hong Kong psychiatrist Elisabeth Wong. “But instead of seeing quarantine as a punishment, people who experience it may also see it as an act of altruism. You are doing something good for society,” she says.

But as his quarantine continues, Chan becomes increasingly concerned about his mental health. “I try to look at it rationally. The only thing I can control is how I approach it and what I do with my time,” he says. “You have to try to see things in a different perspective. I’m trying to make something useful out of it, to hopefully be able to look back on this as the time I was locked in a hospital room for X number of days.”

Also read: One hundred ski monitors test positive in Austria: virologists urge caution (+)