Leanda Lee
Another show of superfluous consumption has given us the Wuhan coronavirus, threatening to knock on our doors and anything we contact. Sanitation of public facilities and directing citizens to take person responsibility for hygiene was the original level of what is now escalating caution in Macau.
On Wednesday, casino workers were directed to wear masks and the public was advised to don them where people might congregate. Group tours from Wuhan have been banned. The premonitions of the tourism authority cancelling Lunar New Year celebrations in Macau were laughable until they became reality yesterday. In China, Wuhan’s public transport services went into lock-down yesterday morning and a quarantine placed over the city at a time of the year with the highest mobility in the country.
All this for what? The poor management of and desires for a civet cat or other exotic wild-life meal? Extending this form of uncontrolled avarice to a similar set of objectionable values and entirely poor taste, it would have been healthier, and less damaging and wasteful to import some roast koalas.
Having been informed by Wuhan City authorities on 31st December of a cluster of cases of pneumonia and receiving gene sequencing information, the World Health Organization lauded the speed with which the Chinese authorities were able to offer the global community preliminary identification of the new virus. Wednesday, at an emergency meeting, the WHO did not declare the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV a global health emergency due to insufficient information and met again yesterday. So far animal-to-human cases have been identified and cases of human-to-human transmission, which were confirmed this week, appear to be between those in close contact, like family members and health providers.
After the first imported case of the virus to Macau was reported Wednesday, the response shifted dramatically yesterday as a second case was recorded. The original position of the government on Wednesday for a system to distribute masks to only local residents was rightly amended. Non-residents make up over 45% of the workforce, often in close proximity to employers in family homes, providing care to the young, elderly, and sick, living in tight living quarters and taking public transport. As such, the health of the entire population would have been compromised had this segment of the community been excluded from the program to curtail the spread of the disease. In such circumstances, the automatic response of prioritizing local residents backfires fabulously.
The mask distribution system was to partly alleviate any panic-buying by consumers and the predictable opportunism by retailers. In a show of greed in times of public need, sufficient numbers of pharmacies price-gouged on surgical masks and sanitizers to support such merchants’ deservedly poor reputation: individual profit trumps community welfare. This poor show is only matched by enough individuals hoarding these items to create a supply deficit. This, again, only lowers access for other members of the community, thus undermining community-wide health outcomes: short-sighted individual self-interest – which also exacerbated the risk to the public as crowds lined up together grabbing their quotas.
Behaviours counter to the common good are easily attributed to ignorance. We have seen in discussions on how to quickly mobilize society to act for both mitigation and adaptation to the climate crisis and other environmental disasters, that those that are most immovable are often the better informed. Perspectives and behaviours are more about values, and less about facts and information as the IPCC has recognized. Professor Maisa Rojas, the COP25 Scientific Coordinator explains that after 30 years of naively assuming scientific facts will speak for themselves, scientists now realise that perceptions, values and storylines are crucial for behavioural change.
Social and political transformation towards mitigating crises rely on both facts and community values. Wuhan its causes and responses, Macau and her responses hold interest as case studies on how values drive action and community behaviours.
My prediction for the New Year: the Rat will nudge work on global community values.
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