Our Desk | Still room for improvement

Anthony Lam

At the time of writing, the government has just resumed most public services.
The government had announced the suspension of non-essential services due to the outbreak of Covid-19, also referred to as novel coronavirus.
The outbreak began right around the Lunar New Year period, so the government acted promptly to suspend services. The exact Cantonese phrasing used by the government was that it was merely an extension of the Lunar New Year holiday for all “non-essential” civil servants.
The government also suspended casino operations for 15 days, which was, according to some veteran journalists, unprecedented. It also “recommended” that casino bosses consider the shutdown period as special paid leave for their employees. No wonder 90% of residents were satisfied with the government’s work against the epidemic, according to a recent survey.
Another reason the government’s work was applauded was the introduction of basic IT (eventually!) to aid the government’s work. An undeniably good example of this is the live monitoring of facemask stocks. Many were surprised that the system was set up in just a couple of days.
My reasoning is that the Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture, Ao Ieong U, who is handling epidemic control, holds an IT degree and the engineers in the field cannot deceive a supervisor holding the same degree, right?! The secretary would probably say, “I write programs too, so don’t lie to me.”
Even when viewed through a layman’s eyes, inventory tracking and monitoring is not that difficult. It is a game of addition and subtraction. Yet I am impressed by the work of the government.
Information technology, computer science, or whatever it is called, requires a strong capability for logical or step-by-step thinking. When writing a computer program, the procedure or the flow must be clear and not contradict itself, or the program will crash. It will just not work.
As a contrast, the announcement of the suspension and then resumption of public services was made in a rather different manner.
When the announcements were made, the daily press briefing of the government indicated “emergency services,” such as those provided by the 999 hotline, would run as normal.
The other suggestion that the government gave was that residents should not rush to government offices if their request was not urgent, but did not define what it would regard as “urgent.”
Everybody thinks their matter’s urgent in some ways, the same way a patient would consider their follow-up medical consultation urgent. In fact, many patients were unsure about what they should do when the Health Bureau announced the suspension of non-critical services.
When the government announced the resumption of work, the same problems arose again.
The first quarter is the season of making income declarations for tax evaluation. Although they could have made an early decision, the Financial Services Bureau acted slowly and announced that the deadline for income declaration had been postponed to the end of March only after people had started gathering in front of its doors.
Let’s hope the government will learn from this and maintain its efforts to further improve.