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Coronavirus pandemic
OpinionComment
Philip Bowring
Philip Bowring

Opinion | Why Hong Kong’s coronavirus measures are out of proportion to the risk

  • Hong Kong officials’ obsession with reducing case numbers to zero means they have paid scant regard to society’s broader interests
  • There is no denying the global scale of the pandemic but, unless kept in perspective, the cure may be worse than the disease

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Home Affairs Department staff distribute notices to residents in Jordan on January 21 to undergo mandatory Covid-19 testing following an outbreak in the community. Photo: K.Y. Cheng
Philip Bowring

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics” is an oft-used phrase to denote the misuse of statistics, be they wrong or misinterpreted. For the past year, we have been deluged on a daily basis with numbers – Covid-19 cases, deaths and hospitalisations – and then data about the fallout from lockdowns, school closures and attendant unemployment, government debt levels, etc.

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Scary headlines about the number of deaths can be misleading if they are taken out of a broader context of past and present measures of health and mortality.

Let us start here in Hong Kong where we are well into another round of mitigation measures which will last at least through the Lunar New Year. During the past year, there had been 167 Covid-19-associated deaths at the last count. That is out of a total number of deaths for the period of around 49,000.

There is scant evidence to suggest that Covid-19 has raised the death rate. Indeed, the rate in the 12 months to June 2020 showed a slight drop compared with 2019 as a whole, at a time when death numbers are rising by 1 per cent to 3 per cent a year due to population ageing and increase.

It is not even clear how far Covid-19 was more than a contributory factor in the deaths attributed to it, given that many people were over 80. The numbers are anyway minuscule compared with pneumonia deaths – the second-largest cause of death after cancers. Like Covid-19, pneumonia mainly kills the elderly who are already weakened by other conditions.
Nor has Covid-19 been notably lethal in Hong Kong compared with the winter seasonal influenza – that killed 356 in 2019, more than Covid-19 did in a year. Of course, Covid-19 deaths would probably have been much higher without government-mandated restrictions and mask-wearing. But even then it is questionable whether they would have made a noteworthy mark on the overall, age-adjusted death rate.
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