Hong Kong has seen a mass exodus following the anti-extradition bill protests in 2019 and the implementation of the sweeping national legislation in June 2020. The city is once again seeing scenes like those in the years leading up to the Handover, with people packing up and starting a new life in a foreign country.
While the government disputes the scale of the phenomenon, and attributes the population change to the Covid-19 pandemic, HKFP has compiled ways of measuring the extent of the mass exodus.
School vacancies
According to data provided by the Education Bureau, public primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong saw a total of 63,098 vacancies in November. Secondary school vacancies recorded an increase from 44,539 last October to 45,363 in November.
HKFP also compiled data from four English-language prestigious secondary schools, and found that each school, on average, had 120 early exit students in the 2020-21 school year.
https://hongkongfp.com/2022/01/16/explainer-how-to-measure-hong-kongs-mass-exodus/