Hong Kong faces an uncertain future without a firm hand to drive Covid-19 vaccinations

The sobering forecast that we face at least one more year of living with pandemic restrictions should push Hong Kong’s political and economic leaders to take a much tougher line to reach herd immunity

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People browse at the Hong Kong book fair on July 14. The fair was postponed twice last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Unless vaccination rates go up, Hongkongers can expect no reprieve from the current travel and social distancing restrictions. Photo: AP

Mike Rowse

Mike Rowse has lived in Hong Kong since 1972, and is a naturalised Chinese citizen.

Published: 1:30pm, 25 Jul 2021Updated: 1:30pm, 25 Jul 2021

At long last, Hong Kong people have been told the plain unvarnished truth about the prospects of our community returning to pre-pandemic normality.

We can at least have a sensible dialogue about options, now that the truth is out there. For that we should thank Dr Gabriel Leung, former undersecretary for health and now dean of the University of Hong Kong’s faculty of medicine.

For weeks, the administration has been implying that success is just around the corner, with the number of vaccinations each day breathlessly reported. The forecast for us to achieve a reasonable level of vaccination – at least 70 per cent with one dose – has slipped to the end of September, and is expressed more as a hope than a firm target.

This reticence is justified. The best guide to what is going on is probably the table on vaccinations per hundred of population. At the end of last week, the figures for some of our nearest comparators were as follows, according to Our World in Data: United Arab Emirates 166; Singapore 117; mainland China 105; Macau 73; Hong Kong 68.

These numbers feed directly into the percentages of total populations that have been wholly or partly vaccinated. Not to hammer home the point too much, but the figures for Singapore and Hong Kong are 71 and 39 per cent respectively.