When Dr Liang Wannian sets foot in Hong Kong on Monday, he will be the highest-ranking Beijing health official coming to help manage the worsening fifth wave of Covid-19 infections. As a key architect of China’s “zero-Covid” strategy, Liang has been a regular face at major press conferences on the progress of virus containment in the country since 2020. The 60-year-old firefighter previously led the Covid Response Expert Team of the National Health Commission (NHC) a number of times, heading to the front lines to help local governments handle outbreaks in the past two years. Top mainland Chinese expert on Covid to arrive in Hong Kong; 26,026 cases logged Liang helped contain Beijing’s severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak (Sars) in 2003 and the first wave of Covid-19 infections in Wuhan in 2020. He will investigate and formulate urgently needed policy recommendations for the Hong Kong government. Liang’s boss, NHC’s deputy director Wang Hesheng, is backing him up with thousands of medical staff and a wealth of supplies from Shenzhen’s command centre via a top-level tripartite coordination group to help manage the outbreak in Hong Kong. Both Wang and Liang were key members of Beijing’s team to Wuhan in 2020. Liang, who is director of the NHC’s health system reform department, will relieve the first team led by Kang Min, head of the infectious disease institute under the Guangdong Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. The coordination group was formed under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s instruction and headed by Xia Baolong, director of the State Council’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office. In the past two years, Liang has been a staunch advocate of the dynamic zero-infection strategy. He said earlier this month it was still “the best choice for current epidemic prevention and control” as it not only helped reduce deaths and infections, it also prevented medical resources from being depleted in major outbreaks so that residents’ daily needs could still be met. “The goal of ‘dynamic clearing’ is not to blindly pursue zero infections, but to cut off the chain of transmission as soon as possible to minimise the occurrence of infection, severe illness and death,” he said. He explained that given China‘s huge population base, a surge of confirmed cases in a short period of time would lead to bottlenecks in medical resources, shortage of epidemic prevention materials and increasingly high workloads for medical personnel. He estimated that about 12 million to 15 million people could be infected every week if China had a massive outbreak similar to what happened in Western countries, and that would be a huge burden that the medical system could not bear. Liang cited China’s 8.1 per cent gross domestic product growth in 2021 and hailed the strategy as having played a major role in both epidemic prevention and control and economic development. On the debate between “coexisting with Covid” and “dynamic clearing”, Liang said many European countries might lose the hard-won results of epidemic prevention work done in the early stages as they had lifted control measures too early. Liang formulated part of the current “dynamic clearing” strategy nearly two decades ago when he was transferred from Beijing’s Capital Medical University to the city’s health bureau as part of a major reshuffle after a number of senior officials who failed to contain the Sars outbreak and also concealed information on the infections were sacked. Liang quickly allocated dedicated hospitals in Beijing to quarantine and treat Sars patients and worked alongside top epidemiologists from other provinces to eradicate the outbreak in two months’ time. Beijing rushed to build China’s first temporary quarantine and treatment hospital at Xiaotangshan, a move which proved to be effective and was later repeated in Wuhan. Liang, who holds a PhD in epidemiology and health statistics from China Union Medical College, is “not someone you can muddle through”, according to a mainland health official who knows him. “He is so experienced. One sniff and he will know where the problems are.”