Business fell by 70% after people couldn’t dine in at night. Sometimes there’s no customer even after one or two hours of wait, the middle aged taxi driver told me on the ride last night. He keeps a 3-litre disinfectant on his car and cleans it whenever he can.

“I don’t know if it helps, but it makes me feel better,” he said. He works night shift till 6 in the morning and spent the last two years mostly eating dinner in his car. “Sometimes you meet another friend and we’d eat tgt at the rear of the car.”

Last year, when the govt banned tables of more than four, he and other drivers placed a wooden board over the rear of two cabs and had hotpot outdoors. Getting covid doesn’t seem too big of a deal, but some taxi rental companies make theirs driver pay the daily rent even if they

fall sick. “You already aren’t making money and they still make you cough up the rent!”
His mother is in her eighties and has been holed up at her home with her domestic helper since the 5th wave begun. His sister delivers groceries to them once a week.

Still, the helper caught covid after taking the elderly to the hospital for a regular visit. Now both are isolating in their own rooms. “We can only 聽天由命,” he told his mother. He blamed HK’s covid crisis on the govt’s eagerness to please 阿爺, the central authorities.

“Even if we survive this wave. Are we going to hold on to the zero covid policy? Can you really prevent the sixth or seventh? And at what cost? If we keep up 21 day quarantine, will tourists ever come back? I just don’t see how this can go on.”