“Hong Kong saw its Covid-19 death rate become the highest in the world, topping 37 deaths per million people. The recent outbreak was a brutal shock to the 7.4 million residents of the bustling metropolis, which had until recently kept Covid-19 cases to admirably low levels. Hong Kong was once applauded for its response to Covid-19. Then it became the global epicenter of the pandemic.”
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“the most important is the vaccination problem in Hong Kong, the extremely low vaccination rates among the elderly, especially those older than 80 years old. The vaccination rate for them was only about 20 percent by the end of 2021. That’s the most vulnerable population, and they’re not protected at all. The data from our pandemic on this wave is very clear: Those elderly who were not vaccinated actually had a much, much higher, death rate than those with the vaccination.
Another reason is the incidence of infection in Hong Kong was so low in the past. By the end of 2021, we had about 12,000 cases out of 7.3 million people in Hong Kong, which is less than 0.2 percent. So basically in Hong Kong, very, very few people have natural immunity against the virus.
Third, in the past waves, you got about a hundred or so cases in a day, and that’s already a lot. But in those days with only a hundred cases, you can actually put everybody in the hospital, in isolation, in quarantine camps. But when they are not hundreds but thousands of cases per day, then people can only be quarantined at home.
And, you know, Hong Kong is very crowded. Basically most people live in apartments and many of them live in very, very small apartments. Unfortunately, there are many poor people who actually share a flat with many other people. So this space is kind of impossible for you to do any preventive measures in those settings.
And of course, the virus this time is very different. In the past, we in Hong Kong see the virus, we see infections, and then we isolate people. Usually, the spread is very limited once you do that. But this time, especially at the beginning of the omicron wave, when we still had very, very few cases, we did a lot of investigations into each of the clusters.
You can see that in a restaurant, an infected patient sitting in one corner of the restaurant and another customer sitting at the other end of the restaurant got infected. It’s not just spreading to people around you, but can actually spread over long distances. For example, there are cases in apartment buildings. And what people have found is that spread is not because of direct contact between neighbors but because infected air that got removed from a flat from an exhaust fan can go up through the air to the other apartments.”
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“If Hong Kong was much, much better vaccinated, then I believe this wave could’ve been prevented.”
https://www.vox.com/22994648/covid-19-hong-kong-outbreak-omicron-ba2-cases-deaths-record-vaccine