Letters | Hong Kong’s zero-Covid strategy has the community’s overall interest at heart

Overseas experience has clearly demonstrated the price and perils of the ‘living with Covid’ approach
Hong Kong’s strategy has allowed people’s daily life to largely return to normal and provides a basis for resuming cross-boundary travel and reinvigorating our economy

Coronavirus Hong Kong

Letters

Published: 4:30pm, 29 Oct 2021

Why you can trust SCMP

I am writing in response to your article, “Isolation policy for patients ‘unethical’ ” (October 28).

Hong Kong’s anti-epidemic strategy has the community’s overall interest at heart. Globally we see the increasing dichotomy between the “living with Covid” and “zero-Covid” strategies. Overseas experience has clearly demonstrated the price and perils of the former, where rising infections, hospitalisations and deaths have continued to plague people, health systems, societies and economies.

Hong Kong will not be one of them. We remain steadfast in the “zero-Covid” strategy to safeguard the health and lives of our people, especially the vulnerable. Hong Kong has had no local transmission since May and people’s daily life has largely returned to normal, with the city topping The Economist’s “normalcy index”. “Zero-Covid” also puts us on a par with our neighbours and provides a basis for resuming cross-boundary travel and reinvigorating our economy.

It is true that our risk tolerance under “zero-Covid” has been lowered given that the pandemic, especially the more transmissible Delta variant, rampages overseas. We have thus been tightening control measures across the board: requiring arrivals from high-risk countries to undergo 21-day quarantine; cancelling quarantine exemptions except for transport of necessities and essential operations; conducting more frequent tests on inbound travellers, goods and workers exposed to them; increasing surveillance to pick up any transmission signs; casting the tracing and quarantine net wider to curb transmission chains, among other measures.

Revising the hospital discharge rules and requiring further isolation of recovering Covid patients is part of this tightening, to further minimise any residual risk of discharged patients shedding virus in the community, which admittedly is low but not zero.

We respect but disagree with some academics who consider “zero-Covid” unattainable, unsustainable or unworthy. It is understandable that they perceive our stringent but necessary measures to maintain “zero-Covid” to be harsh.

However, “zero-Covid” is our best strategy not only for public health but also with regard to social and economic considerations, and is in line with the aspirations of our community.

Questioning longer isolation of patients to further reduce risk of virus shedding is premised on a small risk being acceptable. This goes against the government’s “zero-Covid” goal, which aims to prevent importation of cases and spread of virus in the community. More importantly, measures taken by the government in the community’s interest must not be called “unethical”.

The government will continue to place the interest of our community at heart in fighting the epidemic.

Professor Sophia Chan, secretary for food and health, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government