Exclusive | Hong Kong can ease pandemic-control regime in 6 to 8 weeks if 2 key conditions met, government adviser says
- In an exclusive interview with the Post, Professor Gabriel Leung lays out road map for city to relax social-distancing rules
- Hong Kong must first fully vaccinate 90 per cent of elderly and procure million courses of antiviral drug Paxlovid to shield vulnerable against ‘exit wave’ of infections, he says
But Professor Gabriel Leung cautioned his timeline was based on two key conditions: achieving at least 90 per cent full vaccination in the elderly population and procuring a million or more courses of Pfizer’s antiviral drug Paxlovid. Both achievements would shield the vulnerable against an expected “exit wave” of infections when social-distancing curbs were lifted, Leung told the Post in an exclusive interview.
“My view is that before the fifth wave largely ends in six to eight weeks, we need to now prepare our road map out of it,” he said. “What we can do now is to forge a consensus and lay out the preparatory work as it’s not like hitting a button and doing it right away.”
As the dean of the faculty of medicine at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and a top epidemiologist, Leung has been a prominent voice in advising the local administration on the Covid-19 fight since the pandemic began.
Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, urged city officials during a high-level meeting in Shenzhen on Wednesday to “plan for the next stage of the pandemic in an orderly fashion”.
Leung’s fellow pandemic adviser, Professor Yuen Kwok-yung, also called for gradual relaxation of social-distancing policies “in the summer” if the local vaccination coverage had hit 95 per cent, in an op-ed piece penned with two other microbiology experts and published in a local newspaper on Thursday.
But Lam rebuffed the idea, saying setting a definitive policy based on a 95 per cent rate was tantamount to “tying up your own hands and legs”.