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

  • To rally the public, clear metrics of success are needed. One way is to focus on the Covid-19 death rate in the population and aim to keep it comparable to the flu death rate, which should free up the government to consider more pressing livelihood issues

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Mother and daughter queue up for Covid-19 PCR tests at a testing centre in the Central financial district in Hong Kong on February 9. Photo: Getty Images
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.

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Bodies pile up at hospitals and mortuaries as Hong Kong records 34,466 new Covid-19 cases

Bodies pile up at hospitals and mortuaries as Hong Kong records 34,466 new Covid-19 cases

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.

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