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Coronavirus Hong Kong
OpinionLetters

Letters | Hong Kong’s zero-Covid strategy has the community’s overall interest at heart

  • Overseas experience has clearly demonstrated the price and perils of the ‘living with Covid’ approach
  • Hong Kong’s strategy has allowed people’s daily life to largely return to normal and provides a basis for resuming cross-boundary travel and reinvigorating our economy

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Crowds in Causeway Bay on October 16. Daily life has largely returned to normal in Hong Kong, with the city topping The Economist’s “normalcy index”. Photo: Nora Tam
Letters
I am writing in response to your article, “Isolation policy for patients ‘unethical’ ” (October 28).
Hong Kong’s anti-epidemic strategy has the community’s overall interest at heart. Globally we see the increasing dichotomy between the “living with Covid” and “zero-Covid” strategies. Overseas experience has clearly demonstrated the price and perils of the former, where rising infections, hospitalisations and deaths have continued to plague people, health systems, societies and economies.

Hong Kong will not be one of them. We remain steadfast in the “zero-Covid” strategy to safeguard the health and lives of our people, especially the vulnerable. Hong Kong has had no local transmission since May and people’s daily life has largely returned to normal, with the city topping The Economist’s “normalcy index”. “Zero-Covid” also puts us on a par with our neighbours and provides a basis for resuming cross-boundary travel and reinvigorating our economy.

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It is true that our risk tolerance under “zero-Covid” has been lowered given that the pandemic, especially the more transmissible Delta variant, rampages overseas. We have thus been tightening control measures across the board: requiring arrivals from high-risk countries to undergo 21-day quarantine; cancelling quarantine exemptions except for transport of necessities and essential operations; conducting more frequent tests on inbound travellers, goods and workers exposed to them; increasing surveillance to pick up any transmission signs; casting the tracing and quarantine net wider to curb transmission chains, among other measures.

Revising the hospital discharge rules and requiring further isolation of recovering Covid patients is part of this tightening, to further minimise any residual risk of discharged patients shedding virus in the community, which admittedly is low but not zero.

We respect but disagree with some academics who consider “zero-Covid” unattainable, unsustainable or unworthy. It is understandable that they perceive our stringent but necessary measures to maintain “zero-Covid” to be harsh.

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