Experts inside and outside the territory say that Hong Kong’s approach will not work; on one hand, it is not restrictive enough to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and on the other, it is not forward-looking enough to shift to mitigation and focus on vaccinations to end the pandemic.
Ooi Eng Eong, an infectious-disease expert at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, said that keeping with zero covid indefinitely is “not possible” and only makes sense if it is a measure to buy time to get the vaccines distributed.
Hong Kong’s
elderly also have a serious vaccination problem — only about half of those between 70 and 79 and about a quarter of those over 80 have been fully vaccinated. The official focus on zero covid had many thinking they wouldn’t need the vaccines.
Instead of focusing on vaccinations, city authorities kept ties to the outside world at an absolute minimum, neglected to boost hospital capacity and focused on scapegoating, including an
ill-advised culling of the hamsters widely kept as pets because they might be a source of infection.
David Owens, a founding partner of OT&P Healthcare, which is among the biggest private health-care providers in Hong Kong,
wrote in a recent blog post that the “reluctance to consider scenarios other than a return to zero Covid is the antithesis of prudence.”
“Vaccinations work, and they are the only long-term solution,” he wrote, urging the government to acknowledge that zero covid is a “temporary state.”