Explainer | Omicron has brought Hong Kong to its knees. How did it go so horribly wrong, and can the city go back to its zero-Covid days?
- Public health care system is on the brink of collapse, patients lie in beds outside hospitals and thousands more wait days for admission to isolation facilities
- City managed to keep the virus at bay for two years, so when did Hong Kong start to lose control, and what went wrong with preparations for the fifth wave of infections?
Hong Kong was once proud of its achievements in containing Covid-19, managing to keep infection rates among the lowest in the world. But with caseloads growing exponentially this month, the public health care system is on the brink of collapse, patients lie in beds outside hospitals and thousands more wait days for admission to isolation facilities. The Post looks at why the situation has gone so horribly wrong.
When did Hong Kong start to lose control of the situation?
From the end of the fourth wave last April, Hong Kong had mostly seen imported infections, and daily caseloads were usually in single figures or low double digits.
The current fifth wave of local transmissions was started by aircrew members, including two who flouted quarantine rules upon returning from overseas.
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While contact tracing and quarantining largely kept the outbreak under control, local infections started to soar from mid-January, triggered by a returning traveller who was infected with the highly transmissive Omicron variant during her hotel quarantine.
Hundreds of residents of Kwai Chung Estate were subsequently infected. Despite unprecedented lockdowns of three housing blocks on the estate for between five and seven days, untraceable cases continued to increasingly emerge in the community.
In early February, shortly after the Lunar New Year holiday – a traditional time for family gatherings – the number of daily infections grew exponentially, breaking the 1,000 threshold last Wednesday. A string of record highs ensued in the past week, reaching 4,285 on Wednesday.
What has gone wrong with the city’s preparations for the fifth wave?
In late December, health minister Sophia Chan Siu-chee told the public the government had already “prepared for the worst” in case of a widespread outbreak. She chaired a meeting before Christmas to prepare a response plan.