Pandemic Minds: COVID-19 and Mental Health in Hong Kong

Pandemic Minds: COVID-19 and Mental Health is a collection of first-hand accounts about stressful experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, told by Hong Kong residents from all walks of life, such as parents, healthcare workers, foreign domestic workers and expatriates. The

author, Hong Kong-based journalist and qualified psychotherapist Kate Whitehead, supplements these accounts with literature reviews analyzing the pandemic from the perspective of psychopathology.

Under the city’s COVID-19 quarantine regulations, all new arrivals had to undergo a mandatory three-week quarantine in hotel rooms, where they were completely cut off from the outside world. Adding to the feeling of isolation and neglect was the lack of empathy from medical staff. Jean-Paul, a businessman who underwent hotel quarantine, expresses his dissatisfaction towards the cold, unsympathetic attitude of the staff carrying out COVID tests. He complains, “One of them said in an aggressive tone, ‘Sit in that chair; give us your passport.’ Imagine: I’ve not spoken to anyone for 10 days and this is what I hear?” (Jean-Paul, qtd. in Whitehead 18).

Citizens and new arrivals who tested positive for COVID-19 were sent to quarantine centers to isolate until their recovery, struggling with chaotic admission procedures and unresponsive, even downright abusive staff. Siu-hang, who was 22 weeks pregnant upon testing positive for COVID-19, recounts how she was transported to Penny’s Bay Quarantine Center in the middle of the night. “At 4 am, I was put in a minivan with other people. It was so late, and I was so tired; it was crazy” (Siu-hang, qtd. in Whitehead 8), she says. Joanne, a manager for two elderly care homes, reveals a grim picture of the treatment that the elderly received at another quarantine facility. She says, “Some elders told us when they got back that they [staff at quarantine facility] didn’t bathe them, and if they fed them, it was just one or two spoonfuls” (Joanne, qtd. in Whitehead 44).

The accounts given by frontline healthcare workers reveal the extreme strain that COVID-19 put on them, both physically and mentally, due to understaffing and long working hours. Bobo, a senior nurse (IC), says that work pressure from managing COVID-19 wards adversely affected her sleep quality. “I had no problem falling asleep because I was so exhausted, but I’d wake up suddenly in the night worrying about something that had happened on my shift and wondering if I’d made a bad decision” (Bobo, qtd. in Whitehead 83-84), she says.

This book brings together voices from patients and healthcare workers alike, highlighting their mutual struggles under the systematic weaknesses of Hong Kong’s infection control measures. It does important work of revealing the true psychological cost of the pandemic and quarantine policies in Hong Kong, a cost not reflected in official government statistics or news reports during the pandemic.