Frontline perspective: Volunteers for medicine pickup, delivery

Chiang organized a team of 50 volunteers to help deliver medicine to mainly three types of people: elderly people with chronic diseases, COVID-positive patients in quarantine, and those in residential care homes.

Most of the volunteers are pharmaceutical students, Chiang's friends and some retirees. Not all of them can come in every day.

The team also has two vehicles, sponsored by the Hong Kong Coalition, to help with the pickup and delivery. One vehicle is equipped with real-time tracking kit to monitor the temperature of the ambience as some special medicines need to be kept at certain temperatures. It is tasked to pick up medicines in hospitals across the city, and the other vehicle will focus on delivering the medicines that are pre-sorted by the volunteers by names and addresses.

Chiang was not new to this. She had organized similar voluntary work in May 2020, months after the pandemic began.

But this time, compounding the difficult situation is the snowballing of infections every day. Hong Kong recorded over 100,000 COVID-positive cases from Saturday to Monday.