HONG KONG: People in Hong Kong will finally be able to leave home without a face mask beginning on Wednesday, nearly 1,000 days after the coronavirus pandemic mandate was imposed.
Face coverings will no longer be required indoors, outdoors or on public transportation, the semi-autonomous Chinese city's government announced, ending a measure that has become a relic globally as the world adjusts to living alongside Covid-19.
Hong Kong was one of the last places on Earth to enforce mask-wearing outside, with violators facing hefty fines.
"I'm ready to get rid of this," Tiffany, a finance industry employee in her 20s, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). "It costs money to buy masks, and I have had Covid myself."
The move comes as the government tries to woo tourists and overseas talent back to revive the recession-hit economy.
"With the masking requirement removed, we are starting [to resume] normalcy comprehensively. And that will be very beneficial to economic development," Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee told a news conference on Tuesday morning.
delivered to your inbox
Hospitals and homes for the elderly can impose their own requirements if they decide masks are needed, he said.
Public health experts had increasingly questioned the need for a mask mandate in a city where several waves of Covid infections have likely conferred a high level of immunity.
Lawmakers called it harmful to schoolchildren, and tourism experts and business groups warned it was undercutting the city's global image.
"Making it illegal not to wear one is frankly anachronistic by now," University of Hong Kong virologist Siddharth Sridhar tweeted on Sunday.
The masking policy also appeared to clash with the government's eagerness to demonstrate the city was back to business as usual, with Lee promising to welcome visitors with "no isolation, no quarantine and no restrictions" during the "Hello, Hong Kong" campaign launch in early February.
The maskless dancers in the campaign's promotional video attracted criticism online for distorting the reality of a city where face coverings were ubiquitous and enforced with fines of up to HK$10,000 ($1,275).
Official data shows that by the end of 2022, Hong Kong had issued more than 22,000 tickets for mask violations and collected HK$111.56 million ($14.22 million).
Holdout
Continue reading with one of these options:
Ad-free access
P 80 per month
(billed annually at P 960)
- Unlimited ad-free access to website articles
- Limited offer: Subscribe today and get digital edition access for free (accessible with up to 3 devices)