Coronavirus: Hong Kong urged to maintain ‘dynamic zero-Covid’ policy, with Beijing officials and state media warning shift will mean disaster for city
- Strategy embodies anti-epidemic concept that ‘prioritises people and lives, which has also been proven to achieve maximum results with minimum cost’, People’s Daily says
- Shift away from policy will affect resumption of quarantine-free travel with the mainland, it warns
“The so-called ‘living with the virus’ strategy has not been scientifically proven. Implementing it will bring enormous pressure on the medical system, not to mention resumption of quarantine-free travel with the mainland,” People’s Daily said in a commentary.
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Hong Kong records 614 Covid cases as post-Lunar New Year surge continues
Ahead of a meeting of the Executive Council, the Hong Kong leader’s de facto cabinet, member Dr Lam Ching-choi told the Post the city did not have the conditions to relax social-distancing measures or open up unless the vaccination rate – including for the elderly – reached 90 per cent. Currently it sits at around 80 per cent of the overall eligible population but the rate is much lower among the elderly.
Former Hospital Authority chief executive Leung Pak-yin, however, said further tightening measures aimlessly would not be effective in taming the fifth wave – fuelled by the highly contagious Omicron variant – as he expected the daily caseload to reach four digits within three days.
He added that whether one could cross the border without quarantining should not be restrained by the government’s anti-epidemic strategy but his or her own infection risk.