I think the thread title is little xenophobic Did the mink cull in Denmark get this kind of reaction?
Of course it's not "xenophobic," and yes, people made the same comments about the bloody minks.
HK is basically panicking and doubling down in a major way. They have a poor vaccination rate due to very high levels of refusal, and the vaccine refusal is concentrated among the exact group where it's most dangerous--the majority of over 70s were unjabbed, last time I checked.
Keeping the virus out altogether was a winner for HK during 2020, but it's also led to complacency and refusal to get the jab among a lot of the old folks, and the endless snap lockdowns over a single case has caused extreme fear of the virus among many, meaning that letting the virus circulate is psychologically and emotionally very hard to do.
The people in charge are prioritizing the normalization of relations with the mainland, which is still trying to do the zero covid thing, so poor old HK is being dragged along with Beijing, basically.
Hence the panicky responses about hamsters. It's probably all futile and omicron will most likely start spreading anyway, but nobody really knows what else to do.
Meanwhile, record numbers of HKers are trying to emigrate to the UK. I don't blame them. It may be Plague Island over in the UK, but omicron will peak and die away after a while, whereas those staying in HK probably face a bleak future for a whole bunch of reasons.