Hong Kong could impose a strict containment in the face of the coronavirus, like in China, with the obligation to stay at home, the authorities announced on Monday as the financial center sees its “zero COVID” strategy in crumbs and the corpses accumulating in hospitals due to lack of space in morgues.
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam previously ruled out a lockdown of the city and ordered all 7.4 million residents to be tested in March.
But Health Minister Sophia Chan said Monday that this option was possible.
Asked on the radio to find out if confinement was still excluded, she replied: “no. We are still in discussion”. “From a public health perspective, to get the best effect from mandatory universal screening, we need to reduce the movement of people to some extent,” she added. “Residents should stay home or avoid going out as much as possible. »
The day before, Li Dachuan, a senior official from mainland China involved in a joint task force with Hong Kong authorities, described the lockdown as “the most ideal and best approach to achieve the best effect of universal testing”. .
The announcement adds uncertainty for residents and businesses in a city which, until then relatively untouched by the coronavirus, is discovering the chaos experienced elsewhere in the world at the start of the pandemic.
Morgues full
Two years of a strict “zero COVID” policy has largely contained the coronavirus, but the arrival of the highly transmissible Omicron variant has exposed the flaws in the city’s healthcare system and lack of preparedness for a mass epidemic.
Hong Kong has recorded 193,000 cases and 636 deaths in the past two months, compared to 12,000 cases and 205 deaths in the first years of the pandemic.
Hospitals have been strained for several weeks, and officials revealed on Sunday that bodies were piling up there because morgues were full. “Right now, we are facing a problem of transporting dead bodies from the hospital to the public morgue,” hospital authority chief executive Lau Ka-hin told reporters.
Hong Kong’s seven-day average death rate is currently around eight per million people. By way of comparison, this rate is 5 per million inhabitants in the United States, 1.80 in Great Britain and 1.36 in Singapore, which, like Hong Kong, had initially opted for “zero COVID”, but has recently adopted a strategy of reopening to the outside world.
On Sunday, authorities revealed that 91% of those who died in the current wave were not fully vaccinated.
The vast majority of the deceased are elderly. Despite abundant vaccine supplies, vaccination rates for people over 70 were low in Hong Kong before Omicron arrived.
China is increasingly making decisions about Hong Kong’s response to the virus. Mainland teams are building a series of temporary hospitals and isolation wards for infected people.
Hong Kong government advisers include Liang Wannian, a senior mainland official whose South China Morning Post reported the arrival on Monday and who is one of the main architects of the two-month lockdown in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic.