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Opinion | How Hong Kong can find a way to live with the coronavirus – like with flu
- With Covid-19 vaccines boasting better efficacies than flu vaccines, Hong Kong needs to shift its focus to tackling disease, rather than infections
- However, testing, quarantine and vaccinations must stay on our road back to ‘normal’
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A total of 18,369 cases in Hong Kong, among them 667 classified as severe, and a case fatality rate of a little less than 1 per cent. These are the numbers, not of the Covid-19 pandemic but the 2018/2019 season for the influenza virus, SARS-CoV-2’s staunchest pandemic competitor, according to the Centre for Health Protection.
While the numbers are a sobering reminder of how vulnerable we are, even to known infectious diseases, they also offer a glimmer of hope and a playbook for how we can move forward.
After 20 months of Covid-19, a lot has changed in Hong Kong and the world. The speed at which the viral agent was identified was remarkable. Even more so were the efforts to produce safe and efficacious Covid-19 vaccines, the proven best weapon against viral disease. Within a year, Covid-19 vaccines were available to virtually all adults, and soon after, even to adolescents.
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Vaccine efficacies that few dared to dream of were achieved: greater than 90 per cent for the novel mRNA vaccines, greater than 70 per cent for adenovirus-vectored vaccines, greater than 60 per cent for inactivated vaccines. We would be thrilled to be even close to such vaccine performances for influenza.
And despite the possible side effects, all vaccines are, according to current data, very safe with extremely low numbers of severe adverse reactions.
06:18
SCMP Explains: What’s in a Covid-19 vaccine?
SCMP Explains: What’s in a Covid-19 vaccine?
Despite these encouraging observations, vaccine hesitancy is a problem in many parts of the developed world. It is an affront to people in many countries that do not have the choice, simply because vaccines are not (yet) available or are unaffordable.
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