For Hong Kong their experience has not been ours. The tools available are not the same and the geopolitical situation is vastly different.
Here's where they are at this moment in time.
Hong Kong’s scary surge |
Hong Kong is in the thick of its worst wave yet and is facing a dangerous dilemma: It can’t live with the virus, but can’t stop it, either. |
Overwhelmed hospitals have left patients on sidewalks. Testing lines wind across soccer fields. Cases are surging exponentially, and researchers have warned that the wave could kill nearly 1,000 people by summer — more than four times the number of Covid fatalities over the past two years. |
Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, acknowledged yesterday that the epidemic had “outgrown our capacity.” China’s leader, Xi Jinping, urged the Hong Kong government in state-run newspapers today to “take all necessary measures” to curb the city’s outbreak as soon as possible. |
The virus has now spread to more than 20 senior homes, highlighting a major weakness in Hong Kong’s preparations. Just 56 percent of people 70 and older have had at least one shot of a vaccine, compared with more than 84 percent of people over age 11. |
Until this wave, Hong Kong kept the coronavirus largely in check. For much of 2021, the city recorded no cases. The Omicron variant changed that. |
“In a way we were a victim of our own success, because the fatality rate and the infection rate were pretty good until recently,” said Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing lawmaker. “Older people thought they didn’t need to be vaccinated because there could be complications. And the government was hesitant. We have avoided vaccine mandates.” |
| Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese city, cannot choose to “live with” the virus because China demands elimination. At the same time, the city, which retains freedoms unheard-of in the mainland, cannot wield Beijing’s authoritarian tool kit to stamp out transmission at any cost. |
| Certain measures, like a citywide lockdown, could stir anger in a public already deeply distrustful of the government. The government has also hesitated to introduce more invasive contact-tracing apps, in part because of residents’ privacy concerns, and because some worry that the authorities will use the latest outbreak as an opportunity to push through more surveillance measures. |
| But as Beijing exerts ever-tighter control over Hong Kong — through a national security law and sweeping crackdown on dissent — these considerations may start to matter less. |
| Health experts, meanwhile, warn that the political debate has overshadowed the grim medical reality. Between low vaccination rates among older people and the slowness to impose lockdowns, the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon, no matter what path Hong Kong adopts, said Siddharth Sridhar, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. |
“Hong Kong is moving too late,” he said. “We don’t have any good options.” |
