Letters | Coronavirus shows how Hong Kong workplaces are still badly unprepared to battle disease outbreak

Despite hard lessons learned from Sars in 2003, many Hong Kong organisations and educational institutions remain unaware of the need to devise guidelines for facing disease outbreak of such a scale

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Commuters wear face masks as they ride an escalator at an MTR station on January 23. Photo: AFP

Published: 7:10am, 10 Feb 2020Updated: 7:10am, 10 Feb 2020

The novel coronavirus outbreak has prompted most businesses and companies to allow their employees to work from home. This measure can help curtail the disease’s spread and partially address the dearth of face masks.

However, despite hard lessons learned from the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic in 2003, many organisations, including educational institutions, remain chronically unaware of the need to devise guidelines for facing a pandemic of such a scale.

Your report on staff anger in the education sector is a case in point (“Anger among staff as return to school, university looms amid outbreak”, February 2). The one specific area lacking guidance is whether in-house meetings should continue to be held when the risk of human-to-human transmission becomes increasingly apparent under the current circumstances.

As the coronavirus is a novelty, I am borrowing from examples of influenza pandemic preparedness guidelines to illustrate the shortcomings.

The local guidelines on “What Employers/Enterprises Should Know about Influenza Preparedness” (April 2013), issued by the Centre for Health Protection, merely advise that working groups should be split into smaller ones, deputies identified and team responsibilities designated. This advice sounds more like preparation for a leadership vacuum than precautions to prevent staff falling sick.

In stark contrast, this is what Macau’s Education and Youth Affairs Bureau instructs in a circular issued more than a week ago: “Schools are recommended to inform teaching staff of the matters needing attention and conduct discussion through electronic channels. If face-to-face group discussion is needed, it is recommended to try to arrange the meeting place and time of various groups in a scattering manner as far as possible, and control the number of people in each group to avoid the gathering of a large crowd.”