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Letters | Hong Kong’s coronavirus mass testing results support full reopening of city
- The HK$530 million scheme turned up just 32 infections and shows Covid-19 is not the existential threat to Hong Kong it was feared to be. Time to lift lockdown restrictions and stop ravaging the economy
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Why you can trust SCMP
Hong Kong has tested a fifth of our population and found 32 new infections. What now?
I simply do not understand how this helps us. Sure, we can extrapolate that we have around 160 infected people overall in Hong Kong. So what? Other than the fact that it seems remarkably few.
I presume one “benefit” is that 32 people were quarantined and with the reproduction rate of the virus in Hong Kong at less than 1, we have avoided 32 other people being infected. Given that the scheme cost HK$530 million (US$68 million), or HK$16.5 million per infected case that turned up, we could have shipped each person off to a villa in the Maldives for a fraction of the cost.
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Let us have some sense of proportion. Last year, we lost over 10,000 fellow residents to Covid-19-like diseases such as pneumonia and lower respiratory infections. These are also avoidable through lockdowns, distancing, masking and the rest. But we do not tie ourselves in knots to do so for diseases that are 100 times deadlier.
03:07
Hong Kong’s Covid-19 mass testing ends with at least 42 carriers found among 1.78 million people
Hong Kong’s Covid-19 mass testing ends with at least 42 carriers found among 1.78 million people
I await with interest the government telling us what it has achieved by mass testing.
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I must say I do not understand why we have decimated our economy and savaged our society for a disease we now know is most assuredly not the existential threat we feared. End lockdowns now!
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