Shame on all who were party to this fiasco

The Witman Hung Wai-man birthday party fiasco has turned out to be the most unexpected - yet highly entertaining - drama for many Hongkongers who helplessly have to put up with tightened social distancing rules while waiting to see the full effect of the fifth wave of outbreaks.

There's no question that people are taking the incident badly.

Justified or not, many are seeing a huge discrepancy in the ways they are being treated during the pandemic compared with others who are highly placed.

And the administration's to-ing and fro-ing over the quarantine of the socialites at the banquet certainly did nothing to help improve the situation.

"Highly regarded" expert Yuen Kwok-yung's coming to the rescue might save at least half of the partygoers from a 21-day ordeal in Penny's Bay.

But his confirmation that RTHK mandarin program host Joyce Yeung's positive Covid test result was due to contamination did nothing to lower eyebrows that were raised ceiling-high.

It's more than a farce as that would suggest the theatrical - clearly, the event has gone way beyond that.

First, handling of the event was poor. No wonder Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor was angry over the large party gathering when her administration had been urging the public to avoid social gathering.

However, the sequence of events that followed cast serious doubts on the ability of the government to cope with a potentially disastrous outcome of a situation involving a large number of people in power.

As soon as the RTHK program host was said to be infected with Covid, all 180 attendees - including several senior officials - were immediately kicked into the tiny cubicles at Penny's Bay to isolate and reflect on what they had done.

Lawmaker Junius Ho Kwan-yiu was among them. Unlike arrivals from many countries, he never expected he would find himself having to isolate. He streamed his anger while waiting to check in and - maybe to his total surprise too - as he was checking out just a short while later.

Ho had to wait several hours for each process. Couldn't this be done more efficiently?

Lam was quick to name officials who would be taking over the duties of those who it seemed would have to spend 21 days in Penny's Bay, but many were released from the quarantine center.

Were there cracks within the administration? If not, people should be forgiven for suspecting there might have been.

Party-boy Hung must be a rather special and charming character given the number of movers and shakers who rushed to be in his company, but the party to celebrate his 53th birthday should never have occurred.

When the event was held on January 3, health officials were struggling to trace the links among local outbreaks.

Although Lam announced two days later that social distancing would be tightened, society was already alarmed by the outbreaks. It would be absurd to expect the public to be more aware of the danger than the senior officials.

If officials feared being closely monitored by the media in the past, they seem to have lowered their guard now.