It's easy to see why this city is so obsessed with preventing the spread of swine flu. The SARS epidemic in the early part of the decade hit the city hard, and resulted in the deaths of nearly 300 Hong Kong residents, so it's natural that the residents of this city tend to be a little bit paranoid about airborne diseases. But it's also easy to see that many of the measures that both the residents, and the government, of Hong Kong are taking are completely useless in preventing the spread of this virus.
For one, wearing a face mask has been proven to be virtually useless in preventing one from catching the disease. The swine flu virus is tiny – just 80 to 120 nanometers in size – so wearing a typically ill-fitting surgical mask is hardly effective in preventing disease. Unless one already has the disease – in which case the mask would serve a useful purpose in preventing the wearer from sneezing or coughing on other people – wearing the mask is almost entirely useless.
Secondly, the city's policy of shutting down schools as soon as a single student is diagnosed with the disease seems rather counterproductive. Where do all of those remaining students go during the day, when they aren't in school? They go to the malls, to amusement parks, or to their friends' houses. The policy of shutting down schools seems to be based on the erroneous premise that students will stay in their own homes when schools are closed, thereby preventing the disease from spreading within the young, more vulnerable, population. But with students congregating in places outside of school, that premise is faulty, and the end result of such a policy is that students are missing out on their education. A better policy (which, in all fairness, is currently in the works) would be to send the infected students home and to carry on with the schooling unless a larger percentage of students gets infected. But with many schools set to reopen in less than a month anyway, the policy change is coming a bit late.
Lastly, the preventative sterilization of this city is reaching absurd levels. Stores are proud to proclaim that their door handles, escalator handrails, and elevator buttons are proudly disinfected “every four hours.” But does that really do anything? Assume that a door to a particular shopping mall is used by 1,000 people in an hour. Each person has billions of germs and bacteria on his hands, some of which will invariably be transferred to the door handle. Most of the more dangerous bacteria can be killed by a simple washing with soap and water. But by labeling all of these door handles, payphones, and bannisters as “disinfected,” people may mistakingly jump to the conclusion that they are disease-free. A person walking through a door three hours and 59 minutes since it was last disinfected will be touching the same handle as nearly 4,000 other people (to go along with the previous example), yet because it is sterilized several times throughout the day, he may think that he can afford to be less vigilant in washing his hands. Such thinking may be dangerous, especially when the stated purpose of such regular sterilization is to prevent the spread of a transmittable disease.
It is clear that measures are needed to prevent the spread of a disease that may well kill tens of thousands of people. But many of those measures, like washing one's hands regularly and taking care to cover a sneeze, are rather low-key and should be heeded even in times of relatively calm public health. The measures discussed above, however, simply serve to increase public paranoia about the disease, while doing nothing to actually prevent it.
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