Pro-BJ HK businessman Lew Mong-hung a.k.a. "Dream Bear" described on radio yesterday the current approach as 刻舟求劍 (lit: mark boat seek sword) from a guy who dropped his sword into the water. He was looking for his sword after the boat had moved.

LOL, thanks for sharing!
I wonder what the Hong Kong's current approach is (using Chinese proverb) now that I have moved to HK from the PRC.

Um... exactly the same proverb? https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/34141036-post71.html

Twilight Zone:
CAN, T2 at 7pm packed to the brim with no people at all. 😲

I asked my wife about that. She said it's a story about a guy who drops his sword off a boat, marks the spot on the boat where he dropped his sword, then goes back home and thinks he can jump off the boat at the marked spot and look for the sword. I asked how she knows the story and she said it was in her elementary school textbook. Is this some Chinese version of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" or "The Three Little Pigs" that everyone just somehow knows?

There's a collection of chengyu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu) and 俗语 (suyu, or adages) that are somewhat commonly used in Chinese. It's more popular among literary articles and older people�s speech, not as much in casual conversation unless you just want to flex your Chinese skills.

If you are learning Chinese as a second language it is a proper pain because knowing each individual character of the phrase is often meaningless unless you know the underlying story (e.g. what does "mark boat seek sword" mean without the story?). In addition modern Chinese has a lot of new slang, made up words, and carryover words from English that mean something completely different than the English term which adds other levels of complexity.

some examples:
躺平 - originally means to lie down; now is similar to the western concept of �antiwork� or �avoiding the rat race�
Ins - everyone else in the world calls Instagram IG but Chinese people call it Ins
PK - stands for �player kill� in a video game, term is not commonly used in English but means �to fight each other 1v1� in Chinese

That is if your district is running self-reported RAT tests (like Hong Kong is on the whole the end of this week) (at least the HKSARG isn't even bothering to try and label the test as mandatory). Harder if your district is running invigilated RAT or PCR tests though.

If my analogy on participating in these tests is akin to discharging a tax obligation (I can't remember if I've used this analogy on FT yet, I've analogised the Hong Kong Fri/Sat/Sun tests as voluntarily reporting and paying taxes), obviously there will be incentives for people to lie on their tax return.

Hang on, don't they tick off whether every resident in your district or city does the tests?

Shows they trust their government up to this point unlike us in Hong Kong, where we gotten pretty used to doing exactly what the government has told us not to do since at least 2019 (i. don't mask up ii. don't get the vaccine and iii. don't raid the supermarket).

Anyone who does trust the government will not do so again after this. This is one of those "fool me once, shame on you" scenarios.

Made it to Auckland!
​​​​​👍🏼

Hope you get a few days there and enjoy the sceneries before returning to the US.

I didn't ask how she came to know it but it was instantly familiar to my wife (Shanghai born & raised.)

https://weekly.chinacdc.cn/news/TrackingtheEpidemic.htm

March 25: 4988 cases
March 26: 5765 cases
March 27: 5702 cases
March 28: 6409 cases
March 29: 7051 cases
March 30: 8825 cases
March 31: 8559 cases
April 1: 7386 cases
April 2: 9998 cases
April 3: 13287 cases
April 4: 13267 cases
April 5: 16590 cases
April 6: 20614 cases

Seems the doubling time is getting smaller, and went from ~8 days to ~4 days. Should we make bets on when they'll start seeing > 100k cases/day? If this rate of growth continues, it could happen by the end of April.

20K cases and the rest... and that's the rest of the reported cases, let alone the non-reported ones..

I really hope they find a way to back away from zero Covid. People are gonna start to get real desperate in about a week if they food situation remains the same here.

This. Considering how well China usually does plan ahead, the "sticking to zero covid no matter what" strategy seems.. weird.

Pretty sure they do monitor the situation outside of China, especially in Asian countries, and should have come to conclusions that Omicron can't be contained, and that it's danger isn't that high anymore (especially when booster shots rolled out to elderly)

So yes, for once I can say I don't understand what's going on as the logic that was behind 0-covid is gone, and there isn't any reasonable replacement strategy. Sticking to a non-working covid-0 is just.. bad!