VIVIENNE PARRY: Hong Kong’s deadly Omicron wave proves we were right not to chase ‘Zero Covid’

At this point, I can imagine that almost anyone could browse through a list of friends or family members affected by Covid, usually for the second or third time. I know I can.

There is a new wave of infections sweeping the UK, but life seems more or less normal.

Most people I know are not particularly short. On a national scale, Covid hospitalizations continue to rise, but lengths of stay are short and few require intensive care. Even fewer die because our shots do their job.

I dined at a lively restaurant with old friends last week. I met people for coffee and went to a science conference in person, not via the seedy Zoom. I’ve seen a few masks.

I think this is what they mean by living together with Covid.

Hong Kong is learning a healthy lesson as scientists reflect on what we’ve done right and wrong in the last years of the pandemic.

Since the beginning of February, the number of infections has risen to nearly a million, and the scenes in the hospitals are apocalyptic. At the height of Britain’s second deadly wave, the death rate was 18 people per million. It’s double that in Hong Kong right now. It is reported that the coffins are almost finished.

The worst is yet to come. Experts estimate that more than half of Hong Kong’s population of eight million will have the virus by the end of April.

Health workers wearing personal protective equipment transported an elderly patient from an ambulance to a Hong Kong hospital.

As the pandemic enters its third year, most of the world is on track, just like us. So why is Hong Kong stuck in this horrible time warp?

Much of the blame lies in the relentless pursuit of a zero covid agenda.

Like mainland China, the regional government sought to eradicate the virus completely, blindly adhering to a set of policies considered exemplary by some in the scientific community.

It has closed its borders and imposed a 14-day quarantine for all visitors. A positive test result meant ten days of isolation in the hospital, followed by at least two weeks in a quarantine centre.

If only one case had been discovered, the entire condominium and even adjacent buildings could have been closed.

As cruel as it may seem, for a long time people accepted it because it worked.

In 2020, cases peaked at around 125 in one day. Daily infections remained in odd numbers for almost all of 2021. A total of 200 Covid deaths have occurred in Hong Kong so far this month.

And there were British experts who thought we should do the same.

Or at least they did. In March, the average daily death rate in Hong Kong was over 200. So how did it all go so horribly wrong?

Workers transport a body from a truck into a refrigerated container on March 16 at the Fu Shan public morgue in Hong Kong.

Researchers estimate that the number of infections in Hong Kong is significantly higher than official figures, possibly reaching half the population of 7.4 million.

Deaths are rising and continuing to rise in mid-February, leading to more congestion

A number of factors come into play, the first of which is the emergence of the Omicron variant, officially the fastest-spreading virus in history.

Dr. “Trying to stop Omicron is like trying to stop the wind,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Like New Zealand – another country targeting zero Covid – this wouldn’t be an issue if Hong Kong’s population was highly protected by vaccines. But they are not.

Indeed, vaccination rates in Hong Kong are dangerously low. Just over a third of people over the age of 80, who are most likely to die from Covid infection, have received two doses of the vaccine. By comparison, 95 percent of our 80+ patients were vaccinated three times. Why is this?

In a word, complacency. It has been reported that with such a low number of cases, Hong Kong elders do not feel at risk and are reluctant to receive a vaccine that may cause side effects.

South Africa had an equally low vaccination rate, but infection rates were high during the pandemic, so the population was getting antibodies and actually getting infected with Covid. And the Omicron wave, like ours, ended pretty quickly with relatively few deaths.

But no one had ever been exposed in Hong Kong zero-Covid, so there wasn’t even an immunity derived from the infection.

The pain and loss we know so well must be unbearable. There are also signs that they are giving up on the zero covid dream.

A person will be transferred to a bus outside Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong on March 10, 2022, as the government has announced that the hospital will only be used for Covid-19 patients.

On March 10, 2022, hospital staff dump medical waste outside Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong.

Last week, Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam admitted that they couldn’t keep up with mass testing because they didn’t have lab capacity.

He may realize how stupid they are to think they can escape the virus forever, but it’s too late.

However, this is not the case in China, where the government has shown no signs of softening its zero-covid approach.

Last week, at least 11 Chinese cities and regions were closed, including Shenzhen, which is home to 17 million people, amid its own wave of Omicron.

The economic impact of this alone is enormous, not to mention the cost of mass mandatory testing and the hordes of workers in fireproof suits lined up to transport anyone who comes in contact with a positive case to a dreary quarantine facility. . And will it work?

Weeks ago, Chinese epidemiologists suggested that the Omicron wave would peak at just 35,000 cases, but can they really expect the blockade to last forever?

Native Chinese vaccines, Sinovac and Sinopharm, offer limited protection against Omicron. All this means that, like all those poor souls fighting for life in Hong Kong, the great Chinese population is very vulnerable.

It may be tempting to brag, given the list that the UK has at times been rewarded on the global stage for our supposedly lax approach to tackling Covid, but shutdowns in China will impact global supply chains.

If you thought it would be hard to find patio furniture or computer chips in 2020, you haven’t seen anything yet.

For now, in light of what’s going on, most of the zero Covid fanatics seem to have been silenced.

Most – but not all. Some still believe it would have been better if we had adopted the New Zealand approach, which spent two years with tightly closed borders as part of a zero covid policy and managed to save less than 80% of the population from vaccination.

Only a few hundred New Zealanders died from Covid in the Omicron wave.

But a country like New Zealand can cope with such restrictions, unlike the UK. We have very densely populated cities and depend on international travel for trade and the supply of supplies for nearly all industries.

Can our highly international population cope with the exclusion of loved ones living abroad for two years?

It would be easier and easier for some parts of the world.

Ultimately, only time will tell the true extent of the epidemic in any country. But as we have seen from the devastating scenes of Hong Kong, a country is unlikely to emerge unscathed.