Kee Chiu's cock-up over "wear mask/don't wear mask/wear if you have to" summarised from Tan Meng Wah's FB:
As for Hong Kong, its Chief Executive Carrie Lam initially told public officials on 4 February not to wear masks because of mask shortage. After a public outcry, the no-face-mask policy was promptly reversed. To send out a unified message, Lam and her senior aides began putting on masks in public. It also helped that most Hongkongers remembered the 2003 SARS outbreak and took the initiative to wear masks even when the authorities said there was no need to. To solve the shortage problem, the Government approached 400 suppliers in about 20 countries to buy more masks. At the same time, volunteers and female inmates from the Correctional Services were mobilized to help boost production of masks to 90,000 a day or 2.5 million masks a month. According to a survey done in March 2020, 99% of the people reported wearing face masks when leaving home.
In the case of Singapore, it was only on 3 April, after infection rate showed signs of trending up, that the government made an apparent “U-turn” announcing that the authorities will “no longer discourage people from wearing masks” because of concerns that some cases in the community were going undetected. Notably, this was precisely the 4 doctors’ recommendation given earlier on in February.
The Government’s policy reversal came almost two months too late. By then, there were two separate outbreaks – one in the migrant worker dormitories and another in the rest of society. Because people were told not to wear face mask and to continue their daily life, there was now a “reservoir” of unidentified asymptomatic carriers. On April 3, to stop them from infecting others, stringent circuit-breaker measures, scheduled to last till May 4, were announced to restrict people’s movements. On 14 April, people were finally told they must wear a mask when they leave their house. Finally, on 21 April, the circuit breaker was not only enhanced but also extended by another 4 weeks from May 4 to June 1.
Hence, within a span of about three months, Government’s position on whether or not to wear face mask had gone from “no need” to “no longer discourage” and finally “mandatory”. The procrastination and reactive stance resulted eventually in not only high infection rates but also the implementation of harsh “circuit breaker” measures amounting in effect to a lockdown.
