Hong Kong,the global port that opens to China’s land of COVID zero,now has the highest death rate per capita in the world - higher than London,Milan or New York at the peak of the world’s deadliest global waves. One in 20 COVID-19 patients are dying. Many of them are elderly,suspicious of vaccines and the government that has distributed them.
More than 70 per cent of its aged care home residents are not immunised and COVID is running rampant through its densely populated suburbs. Driven by a false sense of security that its COVID-zero status could hold,the public awareness campaigns have been minimal. It took until the end of February this year for the government to impose entrance restrictions on unvaccinated residents.
“When we were hit with the fifth wave,the vaccination rate among the elderly was still pretty low when compared with mainland China,Singapore and some European cities,” Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam acknowledged on Wednesday.
The consequences have been deadly. There are shipping containers that are doubling as morgues,bodies have piled up next to the living in hospital wards. University of Hong Kong researchers estimate that by the end of April 4.5 million Hongkongers will have been infected - out of a population estimated at 7.6 million in 2021.
Ben Cowling,the chair of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong,toldthis masthead in January that COVID-zero was no longer feasible in Hong Kong as it battled to sustain a small outbreak. The city recorded 21 cases that day. It recorded 32,000 six weeks later,the peak of a wave that is now causing its death rate to surge. On top of poor vaccination rates among older residents,Hong Kong authorities were reluctant to impose the mass compulsory testing and lockdowns that allow mainland authorities to snuff out outbreaks by isolating both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases.
China has moved quickly and brutally to crush outbreaks of a dozen cases. Despite the new national security laws that have crushed Hong Kong’s democracy movement,the city still has a more liberal political,economic and social lean than the mainland,and decided it did not have the resources or willpower to do the same.