Hong Kong doctor in self-imposed quarantine says border with China must be closed

Transcript

Dr. Benjamin So checked himself into a hotel after treating patients with coronavirus in Hong Kong. Now he's calling on the government to take similar safeguards by shutting down the border with China. 

So, a doctor at Hong Kong's Queen Mary Hospital, is currently in self-imposed quarantine after two patients he was treating tested positive for the coronavirus. He is still working, but only in an isolated ward with patients who may have the virus. 

Hundreds of hospital workers have gone on strike in the region, demanding that the border between Hong Kong and mainland China be completely closed. Hong Kong has 15 confirmed cases of coronavirus.

Hong Kong's Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced on Monday that 10 of the 13 border crossings would be shut down. 

So spoke with As It Happens host Carol Off about why he supports the strike. Here is part of their conversation. 

Your bosses have said that you're safe to return to work. So why have you put yourself into quarantine?

According to my bosses, they think that there isn't much scientific evidence behind quarantining after exposure to a positive contact of the novel coronavirus. And I would contend that currently there isn't much scientific evidence for anything regarding this latest viral infection.

I would concede that, you know, having been in full protective gear at the time when I encountered these patients who ... later tested positive, I think that on balance of probabilities, I probably wouldn't have contracted the virus during that encounter.

But I felt that it would be better to be safe than sorry. And primarily, I didn't want to affect my family or friends, the people around me, and especially not the people in my community.

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If there were a big outbreak in Hong Kong ... how able would you be to actually deal with that?

I would say our health-care system is not prepared for that at all. We had an outbreak of the SARS virus 17 years ago and since then there has been some effort to try and increase the number of, let's say, isolation wards that we have and also our capacity to deal with infectious diseases.

Unfortunately, during this time, in the past 17 years, we've also had an increase in the population. It's also aged significantly and the occupancy rates in our medical wards are somewhere around 140 per cent year round, even without this latest outbreak. 

So if a full-scale outbreak were to happen, which I certainly hope that it doesn't, our medical wards are simply not equipped to deal with these outbreaks.

Hong Kong's Chief Executive Carrie Lam has announced that there's going to be a tightening of Hong Kong's border with mainland China, but not a shutting down of the border — which is what you and many of the doctors in Hong Kong are saying that there should be.… Why do you think that the border should be closed completely?

I think that when it comes to border control it is pretty much a yes-no question. It's either open or it's closed. You can't partially close it.

Carrie Lam herself acknowledges as much that if you close off one border control point then people will just go to the other border control points that are still open, if they're really intent on coming to Hong Kong.

As long as you have the risk of, let's say, even 10 or 20 people carrying the virus coming in through the border, that could already trigger off a massive outbreak in Hong Kong, which is a very densely populated city.

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The authorities, though, have … suggested that the motivation for this strike of the doctors and the health-care workers is political. That this is a carry-over from the protests in Hong Kong about mainland China's influence. And, in fact, the former hospital authority chairman [Anthony Wu Ting-yuk] said [in a letter to public hospital workers] that you can hold a different political view and different thoughts, but go back to work so you can help combat the pandemic. What do you say to [him]? 

I would actually throw the ball back at them, in the sense that if you actually talk to front-line health-care workers ... a lot of them come from different sides of the political spectrum.

And we all recognize that practically speaking, closing off the source of, you know, all these infected cases is the only way to prevent a full-blown outbreak in Hong Kong. So I don't think that this necessarily has to be a political issue. 

This is one decision where we shouldn't be concerned about the politics. It should be for the good of the people of Hong Kong.

Written by Sarah Jackson. Produced by Kevin Robertson. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.