Hong Kong’s ‘zero-Covid’ strategy will not work in long term, city needs to switch to living with virus, says top epidemiologist
- Professor Keiji Fukuda, whose contract was not renewed by University of Hong Kong, is returning to US this month after five years in city
- Banning travellers from entering Hong Kong is ‘not long-term strategy to fight virus, new variants’, says outgoing head of top public health school
Hong Kong needs to persuade mainland China to let it move forward by changing its zero-Covid strategy to living with the virus, according to Professor Keiji Fukuda, a leading epidemiologist and outgoing head of the city’s top public health school.
“Living with the virus is where we will all have to be at some point. We cannot close borders, we cannot close travel for the long term,” he told the Post in an interview.
“The consequence of having few cases is also that Hong Kong is relatively isolated, and there are so many people unhappy about the travel restrictions, about the quarantine restrictions, and you can see that many businesses have really suffered.”
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Hong Kong has stayed firm with its zero-Covid approach with a view to reopening the border with the mainland, which has adopted the same strategy.
But Fukuda said Hong Kong and the mainland needed to agree on how the city could move towards living with the virus, an approach adopted by many other countries.