Early quarantine best way to avert Sars-like outbreak: health chief
Swift isolation of suspected cases is at the core of the government's strategy to prevent another epidemic, the health minister says
It was a dreaded scene from years ago: people clad in full protective gear entering and exiting a quarantined hotel in a city caught in the grip of a fatal virus.
Ten years from the dark days of the 2003 Sars crisis, the health chief who battled the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus says the government still considers an early quarantine strategy the best way to avert an outbreak.
Food and Health Bureau Secretary Dr Ko Wing-man was responding to concern that a new Sars-like coronavirus had surfaced in the Middle East and that the city's overloaded public hospitals lacked the capacity to deal with another such crisis.
"This is a lesson we learned from Sars," said Ko, who was at the forefront of the battle as the Hospital Authority's acting chief executive at the time. "We must cut off the transmission chain at a very key moment to stop suspected cases from spreading."
The government might use hotels or holiday campsites to isolate people should the need arise to undertake a large-scale quarantine at the community level, he said. When Sars took hold of the city, an entire block at Amoy Gardens, the Kowloon Bay estate where 42 victims eventually died, was isolated. About 240 residents were taken to quarantine camps.
The most recent memory of the practice was in 2009, when nearly 300 employees and guests at the Metropark hotel in Wan Chai were quarantined for seven nights after a Mexican guest was found infected with swine flu. All were released in good health.