All along, we have been taught to be fearless of hardship, difficulties, adversity, and challenges – these kinds of stuff sometimes inevitably happen to us. We have all the more been taught if we want to do so, we must pluck up our courage and confidence to face and confront to show them our fearlessness. Coivd-19 has already occurred to us for over two years, should we still be as fearful as we were at the outset by staying at home or should we start to face it with a new attitude so that we can live our lives with normality, reviving the economy until it is too hard to do so, and mainly resuming our social activities so that we can restore to real human life?

As many of us love to work out in some parks every day to enhance immunity against diseases; for a pity, that all the facilities for us to do so in the parks have shut down due to the latest outbreak of Omicron occurring in this place. The seniors, in particular, rely a lot on those facilities to do exercises to maintain their physical and mental health. They are all now banned from doing so in their neighboring parks. As the pandemic seems to recklessly stay with us indefinitely, many places in the world have already shifted gear by adopting a new attitude towards it by showing fearlessness to it, declaring they are going to live with it as part of their lives by living largely normally as they did in the past. To us, Hong Kong hasn’t even reached the basic criterion to live with the pandemic, it lags way behind the world not only disappointing us but heavily eliminating our right to be healthy. Shutting down all the facilities in the parks which provide us to work out makes no sense, those facilities are to make us strong and healthy but not the opposite, we feel baffled about such a strict measure the authority has blindly imposed on us.

The housing problem may be the biggest issue in Hong Kong, most of the people living in Hong Kong can just live in small houses. The result is many seniors living with their families always need to go out every day in the daytime to wander in the park to give space to their family members who are at home. Amid the pandemic, many seniors need to stay at home, it has already created not a few family troubles or annoyances, for their houses are small. However; when there are parks with facilities for them to go to do exercises to maintain health and benches that they can sit on to rest and while away time in the daytime, they can at least live happily with exercise and freedom. For a pity, the authority has ordered to shut down all the facilities that can provide seniors to do exercises and while away time, rendering them all day long confined to a house, you may never imagine a senior’s space in a house is just a bed. The ground is, that those facilities in the parks are to make the seniors and people strong and healthy, why will the authorities do things by the book or do they just ignore our benefits, arbitrarily or even coercively do anything they want? Is it because those in power are too wealthy and comfortable to understand the hardship of the grassroots, or are they more than rich with their excessively high salary and allowances to provide their seniors with big houses to live in?

I jog in the park several days a week and I have observed that the people who do exercise in the parks are the most disciplined group of people who do exercise on their own but not in a group and they all wear masks without eating or chatting but concentrating on doing exercises to gain health, and such an activity is the most healthy and effective way to enhance one’s immunity to prevent from contracting the pandemic; however, they are deprived of the right to be strong by the authority who don’t even care for people’s needs as their most basic level of criterion to be in the power. Disappointing!