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Penny’s Bay diary: Hong Kong pulled the quarantine rug out from under hundreds headed to the United States – our managing editor was one of them
- Brian Rhoads is one of many who saw the city’s isolation rules shift under their feet in the past week, leaving him with an unexpected stay at the government facility
- From the bed to the food to the Wi-fi strength, he will provide a day-by-day account of his experience over the next week
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South China Morning Post managing editor Brian Rhoads recently flew home to the United States to attend a memorial service for his late father. After he had already left, the Hong Kong government moved the US into a new high-risk category, meaning he will spend the first of his three weeks of quarantine at the government’s Penny’s Bay facility. Over the next seven days, he will recount his experience.
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Flying into Hong Kong during the Covid-19 pandemic has never inspired warm feelings of homecoming, but this journey is smothered with an extra measure of dread.
Hong Kong has – perhaps nobly, definitely effectively – battened its quarantine hatches on a quest for zero local cases while much of the Western world has decided to live with a disease that has infected nearly 300 million and killed more than 5 million.
As such, any step outside the city is fraught with uncertainty and questions with alarming potential outcomes, especially if you are heading to high-risk locales like the United States.
This was not a frivolous trip. When my father died of natural causes in December 2020, my mother declared that we would gather for a memorial service when it was safe. After a year that saw our family members triple vaccinated, a small private ceremony of Mom and the kids was set for December 11.
It was also set amid the surge of the Omicron variant and in my parents’ hometown of Moscow, Idaho, a state with one of the lowest vaccination rates in America, and where, despite the scourge of Covid-19, one observes very few apart from shop and restaurant workers wearing protective masks or observing social-distancing protocols.
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