Coronavirus: Hong Kong health experts warn against ‘premature’ easing of social-distancing rules

Professor Gabriel Leung says city has weathered three waves of imported infections, with ‘not much of a sustained local outbreak’

But rules over maintaining physical space and quarantine efforts should continue for now, he advises

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A woman wears a face mask she jogs along a cargo dock in Hong Kong. Photo: AFP

Published: 7:00am, 22 Apr 2020Updated: 4:25pm, 11 Sep 2020

Public health experts in Hong Kong have warned against a “premature” easing of infection-control measures, even as the city’s daily Covid-19 infections fell into the single digits for more than a week and hit zero on Monday.

The warning came as the government announced a partial lifting of social-distancing rules on Tuesday, scrapping the cap on restaurants’ seating capacity at 50 per cent, but confirmed other measures, including the closure of bars, gyms and other venues, as well as the limit on public gatherings to four people, will remain in place until at least May 7.

With just four new cases on Tuesday and the tally standing at 1,029, Gabriel Leung, dean of the faculty of medicine at the University of Hong Kong, said during a webinar the city had weathered three waves of imported infections – from mainland China, residents aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan and Europe and North America. Yet there was “not much of a sustained local outbreak”, he said.

Leung attributed the success to several factors: the government’s progressively tougher measures, border restrictions, “case-based” steps such as the isolation of infected patients and quarantine of close contacts, and efforts at the community level, such as closing schools and leisure venues.

“It is very important that we do not prematurely relax our measures, in terms of the physical distancing, and the quarantine and isolation,” he said.

Measures could be lifted gradually if the reproductive number of the virus remained below one. The term refers to the number of people an infected person can give the disease to, which now hovered around 0.3 in the city, according to the epidemiologist.