The past weekend marked the 12th anniversary of a pretty nasty bug attack in the Mong Kok area of Hong Kong.
Mong Kok is the most densely populated place in the world. Located on the Kowloon Peninsula on the island of Hong Kong, just off the coast of China, the area boasts a population density of about 130,000 people per square kilometer. By comparison, Manhattan only has about 26,000 people per square kilometer.
Only a handful of months after the People’s Republic of China took Hong Kong back over, a Chinese government vampire hunting group ran into a few bugs in a tunnel under the Ladies Market of Mong Kok. Had the bugs stayed underground the problem may have been small, but unfortunately, the bugs got startled and ran to the surface.
It was Saturday, October 11th, at about 9pm at night. At that time of night, Tung Choi street is a mob scene. The bugs burst into perhaps the most densely-packed crowd on Earth that night, and ravaged brutal swaths through the shoppers as they fled. Since bugs tend to be much faster and stronger than regular people, they tore their way through the panicked crowds, creating even more damage as people trampled each other in fear.
An estimated 7 people were killed by the bugs due to trauma, with an additional 34 succumbing to trauma from trampling.
To make matters worse, there was a H5N1 bird flu scare in Hong Kong at that time. Due to fears the new Chinese government would simply euthanize anyone afflicted with a contagious disease, many of the people injured in the attack that night stayed at home and didn’t report their injuries. And, as one would guess, many of these injured people developed all different types of infections. As many people in Mong Kok tend to live in incredibly overcrowded apartments, these diseases and infections spread rapidly, and within days a huge outbreak of bug attacks hit.
And, like the Chinese government tends to do, it attempted to hide the whole thing.
Needless to say, the area was finally locked down, with hundreds of people treated by military field hospitals. Countless others were removed from the area and transported to “special hospitals,” though none of them were ever seen again.
Of course, the Chinese government denies all of this to this day.