Ada Lovelace Day – Tribute to Dr. Kate Cheng

I pledged to dedicate a blog post on today, the Ada Lovelace Day, and my tribute goes to Dr. Cheng Ha-Yan, Kate, who volunteered to help saved patients inflicted with SARS in Hong Kong and unfortunately contacted the disease and passed away at the age of 30.

Also I’d like to highlight the strength and leadership of Dr. Margaret Ng, another Hong Kong Chinese who led Hong Kong through a really weird period of SARS and continue to keep the world vigilant against aviation flu as the Director-General of the World Health Organisation.

Now to put this achievement in context, we are talking about fight this,

In a city like this,

Source from the legendary Michael Wolf’s protrait of Hong Kong’s density


Where everyone was patrified and did not know exactly what to do (and not to do),

SARS was a bossy, horrible epidemic – 296 people died of the disease and 1,755 became ill [BBC].

I also dedicate this post to everyone who has been through the tough time time – imagine everything holds still in a city and no one knows for certain whether you or your love one still be around the next day…  It is these women and men in the health care industry who work very hard to keep things in check.  People are now comparing the economic downturn with the impact of SARS, but hey, at least people don’t get killed (directly) by the recession… but that’s irrelevant.

What is important is this – Hats off to everyone.  Thank you so very much.