Dozens trapped as fire engulfs Hong Kong's World Trade Centre | The World

well velvet began in a really major shopping center called the World Trade Center in Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island about lunchtime local time it appears from the reports that it started on one of the lower levels where some sort of construction or renovation work was taking place and for throughout the afternoon there were conflicting media reports out of Hong Kong suggesting that at a certain point there were more than 300 people still trapped inside on an upper level many of those were trapped up on the 39th floor now in the last few hours I'm seeing reports of at least 13 people injured so um we're still trying to get a more complete picture of the current situation but for a while there uh there was an emergency situation where clearly hundreds of people were caught up in this let's to China Bill where Omicron is is making an appearance we've seen a couple of cases now emerge but it is battling more serious outbreaks not of Omicron but in another three cities yeah so it's only two cases both in hotel quarantine or one of the cases of omnicron was a fellow in Guangdong Province who was in high home isolation so in other words it's come from overseas and you know the system works it's been caught before these people have gone back into the community but you've actually had a more substantial outbreak uh once again in the east in judge young Province for example uh you've had a couple of hundred cases recorded this week now I know when you look at Sydney or Melbourne a couple of hundred cases sounds pretty good and for a country with China's population it sounds incredibly good but given that China maintains a very strict Zero Tolerance policy it is a bit of a disaster for any of those local officials to be presiding over any form of outbreak even if it's relatively small and at the moment we're going into the middle of winter in China of course that's a season when you'd expect the spread of virus to be a little bit more easy to spread but also too you have the Beijing Winter Olympics coming up in February next year so it's not the time when Chinese officials would feel very comfortable about having outbreaks in different parts of the country and I suspect in the lead up to Beijing we'll only see a further ramping up of the zero tolerance measures to try and stamp it out and to that point has the the Crackdown and the shutdown been very immediate how is it impacting people's lives well there's quite a pattern now when there are localized outbreaks for officials to basically um uh undertake compulsory Mass testing in those cities um in China it's quite possible to do this because most people live in gated communities in these residential developments called saochu they all have the equivalent of a strata committee running them and so they're a staff or volunteers who are able to go door to door to basically compel people to be tested but the infrastructure is there the Staffing is there they're able to set up very quick testing facilities so this has been quite effective in the past we've seen many many sporadic outbreaks in different cities of China including the Delta variant it's not probably a case of whether or not these current outbreaks can be squashed but the bigger problem of how on Earth do you continue this Zero Tolerance policy for such a long time when you know that sporadic outbreaks are going to keep popping up and that's such a good point because of course the rest of the world is trying to to go about a living with covert policy and you talk about the Beijing Winter Olympics when people are going to be coming in so how tolerant are they going to be to potentially big outbreaks well not very tolerant because after the Beijing Olympics uh the end of next year around about November or so is the 20th party Congress these are once every five-year meetings they are major reshuffles of political power at the top and it's such a sort of big sensitive event that you could not imagine that XI Jin being in the Communist leadership would want to change policy and allow some sort of living with the virus before that meeting happens so there's an expectation in China and also in Hong Kong too where they now have a zero tolerance policy that there won't be any change in that policy until late next year at the earliest and just quickly Bev you mentioned the Beijing Winter Olympics we saw confirmation this week that for Chinese volunteers or media staff or whoever who go into the bubble who work for you know two weeks or so at the Olympics when they come out of the bubble they they will have to quarantine in some sort of Hotel facility or similar for 21 days and of course many of the people who do that are beijingers and so you'll have beijingers quarantining for 21 days in their own city which they never even left in the first place quite an unusual policy thanks Bill as always good to talk thanks Beth

Channel: ABC News (Australia)

Views: 5,908

Keywords: Australia, abc, abc news, news

Id: vEfHLvuiNzs

Length: 5min 48sec (348 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021