It is now official: Hong Kong is the worst place to be during the pandemic, while Norway is the best, according to a Bloomberg report published just as I was writing this column.
But, however bad the situation is here, I would not want to trade places with my friends and ex-colleagues in Shanghai, China’s financial capital.
They’re having it tough. There have been multiple rounds of city-wide compulsory PCR testing — which have involved queuing outside in the cold — and partial lockdowns. Then the most recent move? The government has decided to go full monty and has locked down the city of 25m residents.
In response, some traders I know are sleeping on camp beds in the office to avoid being locked out of their buildings. I hope they get a bump in their bonus for this.
One former colleague of mine, a bond syndicate banker, decided to flee Hong Kong just this month and moved back to his home city of Shanghai.
His timing was impeccable. He told me just the other day that he has done more PCR tests within a couple of days than he would do marketing and pre-pricing syndicate calls for a bond deal.
Given that I know how tedious those syndicate calls can be, the comparison was certainly not lost on me.
Another lad, whose residential building was locked down for a few days, forcing everyone to rely on deliveries, set his alarm for 5.59am every day so that he could place orders for groceries online lest supplies run out.
There have been some uplifting stories, too.
A British friend of mine living in Shanghai sent me a picture of one of his neighbours holding a glass of wine while queuing for a PCR test downstairs.
He said it reminded him of me. But I quickly hastened to correct him — if compulsory testing becomes a reality in Hong Kong, I wouldn’t be nursing a glass of wine in a long queue, but rather a bottle of Scotland’s finest.