Why Hong Kong’s coronavirus measures are out of proportion to the risk

Hong Kong officials’ obsession with reducing case numbers to zero means they have paid scant regard to society’s broader interests

There is no denying the global scale of the pandemic but, unless kept in perspective, the cure may be worse than the disease

4-MIN READ4-MIN

Home Affairs Department staff distribute notices to residents in Jordan on January 21 to undergo mandatory Covid-19 testing following an outbreak in the community. Photo: K.Y. Cheng

Philip Bowring

Philip Bowring has been based in Asia for 39 years writing on regional financial and political issues.

Published: 6:15am, 24 Jan 2021Updated: 6:18am, 24 Jan 2021

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics” is an oft-used phrase to denote the misuse of statistics, be they wrong or misinterpreted. For the past year, we have been deluged on a daily basis with numbers – Covid-19 cases, deaths and hospitalisations – and then data about the fallout from lockdowns, school closures and attendant unemployment, government debt levels, etc.

Scary headlines about the number of deaths can be misleading if they are taken out of a broader context of past and present measures of health and mortality.

Let us start here in Hong Kong where we are well into another round of mitigation measures which will last at least through the Lunar New Year. During the past year, there had been 167 Covid-19-associated deaths at the last count. That is out of a total number of deaths for the period of around 49,000.

There is scant evidence to suggest that Covid-19 has raised the death rate. Indeed, the rate in the 12 months to June 2020 showed a slight drop compared with 2019 as a whole, at a time when death numbers are rising by 1 per cent to 3 per cent a year due to population ageing and increase.