Patrick Nip shares experiences of battling pandemics
Former secretary for the civil service Patrick Nip Tak-kuen shared his experience in combating pandemics from the SARS outbreak to the coronavirus pandemic with students at the Shaw College High Table Dinner last week.
Nip, currently an honorary professor at the Faculty of Social Science of CUHK, was involved in handling three pandemics in Hong Kong since the 2003 SARS outbreak, the 2009 swine flu outbreak and the coronavirus pandemic.
With the lifting of mask mandate from 1 March, the city’s last major COVID-19 restriction, Hong Kong is returning to normalcy after three years of the coronavirus pandemic.
On 29 March 2023, Nip shared his experiences, including bringing back 1,027 Hong Kong residents stranded in Hubei Province to Hong Kong in March 2020, introducing the Designated Quarantine Hotel Scheme, coordinating the universal community testing programme and COVID-19 vaccination programme, with about 60 Shaw College students. Professor Freedom Leung Yiu-kin, Head of Shaw College and Ivan Choy Chi-keung, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Government and Public Administration, and other guests also attended the High Table Dinner.
“When we worked out the plan for bringing stranded Hong Kong residents back from Hubei, we prepared contingency plans for many issues, such as which part of the plane pregnant women who took the flight should be arranged to give birth to their babies,” Nip told the audience. “Fortunately, medical staff from the Hospital Authority did not need to implement such a plan.”
Summing up his experiences in battling the pandemics in the past two decades, he highlighted the importance of leadership, the big picture, readiness to listen, empowering the team and effective communication with members of the public.
Nip teaches courses on public governance and civil service at the Department of Government and Public Administration in the current semester.
Content and photos by Shaw College
