Hong Kong Covid divide: Expats get more perks while domestic workers lose their homes

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She immediately told her employer, who urged her to get to a hospital. But once she was there, she said she was turned away, with staffers explaining there was no room. They advised her to go home and quarantine.

The problem? Her place of work was her home and “my employer didn’t want me to come back,” said Maria, noting that they had “kids in the house.”

“I said, ‘I don’t know where I can go. We don’t have a place,'” she told CNN Business, breaking into tears. She asked not to publish her real name, for fear of reprisals from current or future employers, and to not worry her family abroad. CNN Business agreed to call her “Maria.”

Maria, who is from the Philippines, returned to the hospital, where she spent the night sleeping on a chair in the emergency room, along with a friend in a similar situation. But the next day, they were told by a nurse more expressly to “go away,” she said.

Not knowing what else to do, they set up camp on the street.

“We cannot express what [we] feel [at] that time — just crying only,” said Maria.

Maria and her friend eventually found a shelter to stay in, run by the charity HELP for Domestic Workers.

Maria is one of dozens of migrant domestic workers who have been abandoned — and temporarily made homeless — in Hong Kong after testing positive for the coronavirus, according to the charity. Her story, and others like it, shine a light on deep-seated inequalities in the city that are worsening under a devastating fifth wave of Covid-19.

To be sure, workers across the spectrum are struggling in Hong Kong, given its rigid pandemic measures.

But as top companies give their employees more flexibility and even help pay for expensive hotel quarantines, local businesses are teetering on the brink of collapse. And while some expatriates can command higher salaries for simply agreeing to move to the city, the city’s poorest are struggling just to afford food or basic necessities.