On this last day of the Year of the Ox, we should take a solemn moment to look back at how far we have come: not very far, it seems, since the Lunar New Year has effectively been cancelled, again.

Speaking exclusively to the Post last week, former chief executive Leung Chun-ying said we have been stuck in a long, deep slumber while the rest of the world, including mainland China, has moved on.

“We have the next five years as the last window of opportunities for Hong Kong,” Leung said. He was referring the city’s diminishing role as an intermediary between the mainland and the rest of the world.

I’m not sure we have been asleep, though. We have been wide-awake while caught in limbo between two very different worlds. Playing intermediary between the worlds of “zero Covid” and “living with the virus” is making life insufferable.

We have been watching one world open up – with hiccups, of course – to make Covid-19 a part of normal life while trying to achieve the increasingly impossible goal of stopping the virus from being communicable, at least not within our community so we can open our borders with the mainland.

Our position as intermediary might have made us the envy of many economies before the pandemic. Now, though, Hong Kong is a prime example of being suspended between two very different worlds and, even worse, cut off from opening up to either.

No matter how new and improved our electoral system has become, and no matter the “renewed lustre and glamour” as a result of the imposition of the national security law – as Luo Huining, director of the central government’s liaison office in Hong Kong, said in a pre-recorded Lunar New Year speech – we are stuck in a Covid-19 purgatory where we are a state of permanent dissonance.

As an international city expected to play that intermediary role for the nation, Hong Kong has been shut out precisely because we are part of the international Covid-19 world. We have never had a self-sustaining economy and never will have. Our insistence on closing down to the world but not doing so entirely has not shielded us from Covid-19’s global reach.

All the talk about fitting into national development plans or seizing opportunities in the Greater Bay Area is almost insulting when we have cross-border families who have not been able to be together for the past two years. And on this day traditionally marked for family reunions, my heart goes out to all who, to stay safe, have had to be without their families and loved ones.

The latest flare-up that basically cancelled the Lunar New Year has made it painfully clear that the Hong Kong authorities were unprepared for a large-scale outbreak.

They could not handle locking down a public housing estate. Residents under lockdown reported losing their jobs, uncollected rubbish piles, food delivered in the same lifts as trash without cleaning in between, compulsory testing arrangements that were not socially distanced and delays in getting confirmed cases to proper facilities.

We also learned that we have no capacity to conduct mass testing. Our “Leave Home Safe” app, a major part of our track and trace capability, is plagued with delays when it comes to sending out notifications to users.

In short, we cannot manage what is required to maintain “zero Covid”. We don’t get rid of health officials for failing to contain outbreaks, unlike across the border. Instead, we have been talking about getting rid of the home affairs secretary.

All the while, residents are getting increasingly anxious about crucial livelihood problems such as employment, income, housing and health care. These are all areas Luo promised the government would have “more precise and effective measures” for, in last year’s virtual Lunar New Year speech.

Maybe it is because we have been wearing our masks that Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor cannot sense our feelings of exasperation or hear our cries from the fires of Covid purgatory.