Why Hong Kong should focus on one clear goal: keeping Covid-19 death rate low

In view of the worsening fifth wave in Hong Kong, the central government has sent in teams of medical workers and equipment to support the Covid-19 fight. But it has also made clear that the Hong Kong government is expected to deal with its own challenges.

What is not spelt out in the central government’s message, however, is how the local government’s efforts will be evaluated. “Dynamic zero infection” is a strategy, or at best a vague expectation. What we need is a clearly articulated way to evaluate the result, that is reasonable enough to gain majority buy-in from the public.

A week ago, mainland Chinese expert Zhong Nanshan sent his encouragement and suggestions to Hong Kong. He said that life is the ultimate human right. He is quite right; how well we avoid the loss of life should be our first concern.

However, how to count loss of life, or the death rate, can be confusing as there are different metrics. For certain purposes, it is measured by the case fatality rate, which measures the proportion of death among identified confirmed cases. But for Omicron, this is not suitable since the real number of infections can be much higher than officially recorded. What we want is the infection fatality rate, which estimates the proportion of deaths among all infected individuals, but this cannot be easily measured.

It seems a more reasonable metric is the Covid-19 death rate, which is the number of people dead due to Covid-19 divided by the entire population. Notably, this number is independent of the number of infections.

This number is monitored by various data providers, including Our World in Data. If we compare Hong Kong’s Covid-19 death rate to that of various other places, we can see that it was very low until last month, and is rising at a dangerous rate at the moment.

The Hong Kong government should focus on this metric, and make sure that when this pandemic is over, it can tell Hongkongers how well our Covid-19 death rate compares to that elsewhere in the world.

The government should also aim to keep Hong Kong’s Covid-19 death rate comparable to the flu death rate. This is important, since we know that with the fatality rate for flu, while the government is still expected to minimise it, it is not singled out as a more pressing matter than livelihood and social issues.

Once we have adopted a metric for our first priority, and set the expectation for controlling it in comparison with other respectable countries and flu, then there should be room for the government to consider people’s livelihood goals as well.

This is a complicated matter to measure. It involves not only daily issues, such as the employment rate and quarterly gross domestic product, but also involves how much Hong Kong can maintain its business role and standing on the global stage, as that determines Hong Kong’s longer-term livelihood.

The government will tap Hong Kong’s rich financial reserves to fund its Covid-19 policies; the extent of the depletion of these reserves should also be accounted for in this category.

Hong Kong must accept its Covid-19 setbacks and move on

In summary, while Hong Kong is in a dire situation, and there are a lot of policies the government is juggling every day – on which we can discuss and make suggestions – the overall goal must be clear so that we are neither confused nor lost in detailed policy discussion.

The Hong Kong government is working very hard, Hong Kong citizens are by and large quite cooperative in social distancing and getting vaccinated, and we should be confident that we will manage the challenges caused by Covid-19.

We just need to unite, and hopefully a clear goal will help this, and support our government in this difficult time.

Dah Ming Chiu is a retired professor of Department of Information Engineering in the Chinese University of Hong Kong