Inside OutOmicron crisis: how a lack of a community-based primary health care system doomed Hong Kong

Name: Hong Kong’s community isolation facilities, how do they work?
Uploaded: 2022-03-20T22:45:25.000Z
Duration: 2 min 48 s
Description: Hong Kong’s community isolation facilities, how do they work?

A network of community health centres would have avoided Hong Kong hospitals being overwhelmed, and the tragic story of pandemic management would have been completely different

The irony is that, back in 1990, Carrie Lam set out a blueprint for such plans. More than 30 years later, the city is still found wanting

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Patients wait to receive treatment outside the Princess Margaret Hospital’s accident and emergency department, on March 14. Photo: Yik Yeung-man

David Dodwell

Published: 6:45am, 21 Mar 2022

It was in 1992, after Hurricane Andrew exposed the inadequacies of the US insurance industry, that Warren Buffett coined the warning: only when the tide goes out do you discover who has been swimming naked.

Sadly, it sometimes takes a catastrophe to discover the obvious. The global pandemic revealed fundamental weaknesses in our health care systems. And nowhere more so than Hong Kong, where just two months ago we were patting ourselves on the back for a “zero Covid” policy that spared us the trauma and heartbreak of so many countries.

As our Covid-19 toll has since soared to exceed a million cases and 5,000 deaths – our seven-day rolling average of Covid-related deaths per million is now the highest in the world – it is important to take stock of why none of our leaders recognised that we were not wearing a swimming costume.

The history books will point to hubris and procrastination, especially over the failure to use the window provided a year ago by the delivery of vaccines to ensure that we insulated our elderly and vulnerable.

They will point to some spectacularly inept decision-making, in particular the combination of mass testing and compulsory quarantines.

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Hong Kong’s community isolation facilities, how do they work?

When so many other governments had encouraged testing at home and advised those with mild symptoms to isolate at home where possible, why did our government force everyone into crowded testing centres and enforce a hospital quarantine that meant beds became occupied by people either asymptomatic or suffering from symptoms most of us would describe as a mild cold?