Hong Kong Covid Expert Says City Should Reopen to Rest of World
Hong Kong Covid Expert Says City Should Reopen to Rest of World
(Bloomberg) -- Hong Kong should reopen its borders to the rest of the world if six months of being Covid-19 free isn’t enough to enable authorities’ sought-after travel bubble with China, a top epidemiologist in the city said.
“We’ve got to look to reopen the border with the mainland as soon as possible,” Benjamin Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong, told Bloomberg Television on Monday. “If there’s maybe not an easy way to do that, then I think maybe it’s time to start looking in the other direction.”
The Asian financial hub is in ongoing discussions with mainland officials to resume quarantine-free travel between the two, with a focus on whether Hong Kong could adopt a health code system similar to China’s in order to classify residents’ risk of getting Covid, local media has reported. Limited travel across the border could come as early as end of this year, according to lawmaker Michael Tien, a Hong Kong deputy of China’s National People’s Congress.
But Cowling said a bubble arrangement with the mainland could prove fragile, in part because Hong Kong may not be equipped to stop the transmission of the highly contagious delta variant should it breach the densely populated city. Chinese officials are currently working to halt their own growing outbreak fueled by the strain, which is managing to get around even the mainland’s increasingly aggressive methods of containment.
“Look at Singapore, Australia, New Zealand -- they all had trouble stopping delta,” Cowling said. “We don’t have the same tools at our disposal as the mainland.”
Hong Kong should follow former adherents of the Covid Zero policy in shifting gears from pursuing elimination to easing restriction and open borders “so that we are not left behind in the region,” he added.
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With assistance from Bloomberg