Daily cases in the city have risen from a little over 100 to over 6,000 in less than a month, topping anything seen in China’s initial wave centered around Wuhan for February 12, 2020, when reporting A backlog of s saw daily cases above 15,000 . That, and subsequent outbreaks in China were brought under control by the lockdown that Hong Kong’s chief executive Carrie Lamo Said it’s off the table.
Instead, officials plan to test each of the city’s 7.5 million residents by turning hotels into isolation centers. However, the testing blitz won’t begin until next month, raising concerns that the virus could run rampant in the meantime, further straining an already overwhelmed health system.
“Lineing in and gathering for testing presents a huge infection risk,” said jin dong-yano, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. “If the case load reaches thousands as predicted, then mass testing will only make things worse. You need to avoid contact as much as possible.”
Jin said thousands of daily infections meant mainland China’s strategy of large-scale testing to disrupt transmission had already been lost.
“In China they are only able to do this because infections are so low that they can kill mosquitoes with a cannonball.” He said, referring to the external reaction, the mainland authorities only mounted on detecting a few cases.
While more is now known about the virus and how it was treated when it first appeared in Wuhan, Hong Kong is also dealing with a more infectious Omicron version. And while more than 10 billion vaccine doses have been given around the world, only 35% of Hong Kong residents aged 80 or older have been vaccinated, making them particularly vulnerable.
Local media outlets reported that Hong Kong will report at least 3,600 confirmed COVID cases and about 7,600 initial cases on Friday.
The authorities should now aim to reduce the spread of COVID, instead of trying to bring the cases back to zero, said ben cowlingAn epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong.
“That means home isolation, home quarantine, and rapid testing to inform people’s behavior,” Cowling said in an interview on Bloomberg television. “At the moment we are still seeing that every case needs to be hospitalized. This cannot continue.”
Hong Kong is struggling to increase its testing capacity from the current level of just 20,000 per day. Hospitals have also been filled due to the rigid policy of accepting all confirmed infections, even if people are symptom-free. The Hong Kong government is also scrambling to convert hotel rooms into isolation centers, while waiting for the mainland to help build a massive isolation facility.
“I would not rule out the hundreds of thousands of infections that could be traced to this mass testing exercise,” Cowling said. “Where will all these matters be kept. Because we don’t have isolation facility for so many people.”
admin Michael Tien Described the lack of adequate isolation facilities as the main impediment in implementing the mainland’s COVID Zero playbook. He said that mass testing can be possible only after 20,000 to 30,000 isolation units are available.
“It’s really more about damage control, I guess, at this point,” Tien said.
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