March 15, 2022

expert reaction to COVID-19 situation in Hong Kong

A few journalists have asked us about the current surge of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Hong Kong, so here is a comment from Dr Julian Tang in case useful.

Dr Julian Tang, Honorary Associate Professor/Clinical Virologist, Respiratory Sciences, University of Leicester, said:

“Compare case numbers and deaths in Hong Kong (Feb-Mar 2022) with that of the UK (Dec 2021 – Jan 2022) when Omicron first appeared:

“The figures per capita seem proportionately worse in Hong Kong than the UK during this period – with the death rate in the mostly unvaccinated elderly in Hong Kong more similar to that in the UK’s first wave prior to the vaccine rollout.

“The enforced isolation/quarantine in Hong Kong worked really well in the early pandemic before there was widespread community transmission of the virus – but now, under the ongoing zero COVID strategy, it is impossible to do this for all new cases – and all the people gathering/queuing for mass testing and isolation/ quarantine in newly built mobile isolation centres is likely spreading the virus further.

“This is compounded by the widespread use of the CoronaVac vaccine, which has been shown to be relatively poorly effective against previous variants – and which produces no detectable neutralisation of Omicron – though boosting with Pfizer vaccine does generate a more effective immune response (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01705-6.pdf)

“Ideally, Hong Kong needs to boost or vaccinate all their citizens with the mRNA vaccines to better control the spread of Omicron – and consider moving away from a zero-COVID strategy.

“Note that all of the current generation of COVID-19 vaccines are still based on the original Wuhan virus – and each new variant (including the other strain of Omicron, BA.2, which is now spreading further) – will just be more and more capable of escaping the current vaccine protection (https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/01/study-suggests-ba2-covid-19-subvariant-more-contagious; https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.28.22270044v1; https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1057359/Technical-Briefing-37-25February2022.pdf).”

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.