After the outbreak

摘要

At dawn on March 31st, police wearing surgical masks, gloves and cloaks cordoned off Block E of Amoy Gardens, a housing estate in Hong Kong, and placed all those inside under quarantine. But only 241 tenants in 108 flats were left. The residents of the other 156 flats had already fled-to relations, hotels or friends-possi-bly spreading the virus they were suspected of carrying with them into the community. Amoy Gardens and much of Hong Kong recalled pestilent Oran, in Ca-mus's "The Plague": "And while a good many people adapted themselves to confinement and carried on their humdrum lives as before, there were others who rebelled and whose one idea now was to break loose from the prison-house."