LettersHow Hong Kong can plan a transition to ‘living with Covid’

Readers discuss the need to be creative in balancing public health protection with economic damage control, the city’s overreaction to the fifth wave, and the crippling restrictions affecting cross-border goods flow

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Hongkongers queue to take Covid-19 tests on February 23. Hong Kong will conduct compulsory testing of its entire 7.4 million population in March. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 11:30am, 24 Feb 2022

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Recently, there have been calls in Hong Kong for “living with the virus”. But will the community be amenable to this U-turn in our strategy and has the government the political will to embark on this course?

“Living with Covid” means focusing our efforts on minimising the number of hospitalised, severe and terminal cases instead of infection numbers.

In the early days of the pandemic, Hong Kong was hailed as a success story in controlling the disease, in part helped by our past experience in dealing with severe acute respiratory syndrome. But now, our city’s medical system has been overwhelmed. Hong Kong must brace itself for a new approach to tackling the virus before the unforgiving reality hits.

Living with the virus is not admitting defeat, nor as daunting as it seems, as reported in the American and European experience. But mass vaccination is key. It would alleviate the medical burden to more manageable levels with shortened hospital stays and fewer patients needing intensive care.

Two countries living with the virus, the UK and the US, already have 85 per cent and 65 per cent of their populations fully vaccinated respectively, while more than 65 per cent of the UK population has also received a booster.