Feel strongly about these letters, or any other aspects of the news? Share your views by emailing us your Letter to the Editor at letters@scmp.com or filling in this Google form. Submissions should not exceed 400 words, and must include your full name and address, plus a phone number for verification. Why is that almost 25 years after the handover and after battling Covid-19 for two years, many people speaking of Covid-19 policies here continue to ignore the fundamental capability differences between Hong Kong and mainland China? Do people really not know what it actually took for mainland China to effectively implement a “dynamic zero Covid” containment strategy?
For the two years before
Omicron hit, Hong Kong had the illusion of successful containment. However, Hong Kong does not have any of the tracking systems or central planning and execution capability that you see on the mainland. Adhering to a policy that pretends we can execute a containment strategy similar to the mainland’s is a false hypothesis that will only incur greater costs and social discontent.
If we are to conduct more
massive testing, by district, for example, or identify more premises as quarantine facilities, we need to have a defined capacity and logistics plan for how we are going to care for Covid-19 patients. If people feel they are unlikely to receive due care and treatment because of official incapacity, they might just wait for their condition to worsen and eventually need to go to hospital.
This large deployment exercise, if not aimed at curing the Covid-19 patients identified, is only a delaying tactic to seemingly reduce the
burden on medical facilities. Isolating infected people in vacant buildings, which are not well equipped for the treatment of patients, does not compare with makeshift hospitals in mainland China.
Unlike the mainland and other parts of the world, Hong Kong lacks a clear goal. For the mainland, swift and focused containment to eliminate the virus is the clear goal, matched with the capacity to execute it.
Developed economies that do not have such a capacity focused on treating the serious patients, and asked patients with mild symptoms to stay home. This is sensible given their circumstances.
