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Letters | Hong Kong’s defensive Covid-19 strategies aren’t working
- Readers call on authorities to come up with a Covid-19 exit strategy, decry the culling of hamsters, propose a new feature for the government’s eHealth app, and suggest ideas for encouraging civic engagement
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Two years into the pandemic, we are back to square one in Hong Kong, with draconian rules to curb an infection triggered by a human mistake, not to mention the toughest quarantine rules in the world.
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While it’s understandable that the government is keen to stamp out infection and reopen the border with the mainland – although this doesn’t seem likely to happen this year – the steps it has taken are difficult to understand.
The vaccination rate among the elderly is a major issue. Almost a year after Hong Kong’s vaccination programme began, only about 70 per cent of the population is fully vaccinated. With a rate of less than 30 per cent among those aged over 80, the city’s elderly were left vulnerable during the Omicron outbreak.
Our defensive strategies aren’t working. We need to go on the attack instead. Our exit strategy should include a vaccine mandate for high-risk groups and home quarantine for asymptomatic cases. It is not scientifically justifiable to hospitalise a vaccinated asymptomatic person for three to four weeks.
Curfews and lockdowns are measures of the past; we now have reliable vaccines and medication, and Omicron is a weaker variant. This is substantiated by the incredibly low mortality rate in Hong Kong. Let’s use these tools, as we are lucky enough to have them in abundance.
We are back to square one but this time with disputable logic. Everyone is being punished indiscriminately, even the sectors that diligently rushed to vaccinate their staff as early as they could, while we still allow the elderly to regularly go out for breakfast or lunch with no limitations or vaccine requirements. No doubt we will also allow Lunar New Year lunch gatherings to go ahead without any vaccine bubble, increasing the chances of another outbreak exponentially.
Closures and isolation are easy cards to play. I wish Hong Kong experts would share their knowledge so we can return to normal life, instead of living in fear of being sent with our families to a quarantine camp or being threatened with school closures. For the over 1 million people from the mainland living in Hong Kong, this will be the third Lunar New Year spent apart from their families, despite being just a few kilometres away. How much longer must they wait?
The solution to ending the pandemic does not necessarily lie in Europe or the US, but thanks to vaccination, the mortality rate has fallen in those places too.
We did all the government asked us to do: masks, vaccines, quarantine, isolation, washing hands, using a contract tracing app, social distancing. Now it’s time for the government to work on an exit strategy, or the current status quo could simply persist forever.
Marco Galimberti, Happy Valley
We are back to square one but this time with disputable logic. Everyone is being punished indiscriminately, even the sectors that diligently rushed to vaccinate their staff as early as they could, while we still allow the elderly to regularly go out for breakfast or lunch with no limitations or vaccine requirements. No doubt we will also allow Lunar New Year lunch gatherings to go ahead without any vaccine bubble, increasing the chances of another outbreak exponentially.
Closures and isolation are easy cards to play. I wish Hong Kong experts would share their knowledge so we can return to normal life, instead of living in fear of being sent with our families to a quarantine camp or being threatened with school closures. For the over 1 million people from the mainland living in Hong Kong, this will be the third Lunar New Year spent apart from their families, despite being just a few kilometres away. How much longer must they wait?
The solution to ending the pandemic does not necessarily lie in Europe or the US, but thanks to vaccination, the mortality rate has fallen in those places too.
We did all the government asked us to do: masks, vaccines, quarantine, isolation, washing hands, using a contract tracing app, social distancing. Now it’s time for the government to work on an exit strategy, or the current status quo could simply persist forever.
Marco Galimberti, Happy Valley
After culling hamsters, what next?
Many Hongkongers have had enough of the government’s nonsensical anti-Covid policies, which have succeeded in shutting Hong Kong off from both the mainland and the rest of the world.
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