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Outside In | What price zero Covid? We need to know the cost to Hong Kong
- The government’s panic-driven effort to attain ‘zero Covid’ is straining our hospitals and driving businesses big and small to the point of collapse
- Hong Kong needs a serious cost-benefit analysis of the arguments supporting the policy amid evidence of serious, long-term harm being done
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As the Omicron onslaught continues in Hong Kong, undermining the administration’s embattled efforts to stick with its “zero-Covid” tactics, the need is urgent for a rigorous cost-benefit examination of the best way forward.
At a time when Covid-19 was self-evidently deadly, there was clear anxiety over the potential for hospitals to be overwhelmed and vaccines did not exist to provide protection, such an examination argued strongly for a strict “zero-Covid” approach. But that time has passed.
Ready access to vaccines and the fact Omicron appears less lethal than its predecessors means the danger of our hospitals being overwhelmed by gravely ill people has disappeared.
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On the contrary, as the Omicron outbreak spreads across Hong Kong, it is the government’s panic-driven effort to lock down housing blocks and test thousands of residents that is creating ruinous strain on our hospital system.
But where is the much-needed cost-benefit analysis that weighs the increasingly flimsy arguments in support of “zero-Covid” against the mounting evidence of serious, potentially long-term harm being done to our community and our economy?
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It would be unfair to claim there is any deliberate attempt to fudge the evidence of harm. But in the absence of interest in bringing that harm into sharp focus, a proper cost-benefit analysis remains impossible.
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