‘Unsustainable' zero Covid policy to be blamed for hamsters' culling: HKU professor

The “unsustainable” zero Covid policy is to be blamed for hamsters' killing, University of Hong Kong clinical assistant professor Siddharth Sridhar pointed out.

In a Facebook post on Saturday, Sridhar criticized the government’s adherence to a zero Covid policy, which is named as a prerequisite for resuming quarantine-free travel with the mainland.

A travel bubble between Hong Kong and the mainland built on zero Covid policy would ultimately be unsustainable, and would soon need to be stopped if cases inevitably see an uptick on either side, just like the Hong Kong-Singapore travel bubble that “proved just as fragile as a real soap bubble,” he wrote.

“Any such reopening is unlikely because zero Covid is currently unsustainable on either side of the border,” he wrote.

The recent public outcry regarding the government’s controversial move to cull 2,000 hamsters after some tested positive at a pet shop shows the limitations of the government’s fruitless zero Covid policy, which dictates that Covid has to be kept out of the community at all costs.

Instead of slamming government advisors, “their (the public) frustration would be better directed at the zero Covid policy that necessitates such measures”, he wrote, adding that zero Covid is the reason why travelers are ironically put at increased risk of catching Covid-19 in quarantine hotels.

Sridhar predicts that Covid-19 will circulate in human populations permanently, and much of the world is starting to live with it using vaccination and other precautions. But he also said that Hong Kong simply has no alternative to zero Covid given the low vaccination rates among the elderly.

“This means that a key vulnerable section of the population is completely unprotected against Covid-19. Should we have a large wave, our healthcare system will collapse without question,” said Dr Sridhar.

Comparing Hong Kong’s zero Covid policy to other countries’ response to the Omicron variant, Sridhar wrote that large proportions of the global population have functional immunity. For instance, the Omicron wave in South Africa did not overwhelm their healthcare system. 

“As long as Hong Kong has to adhere to zero Covid, expect things to get worse before they get better,” he wrote. “For the rest of the world, 2022 is the beginning of the end of the pandemic. For Hong Kong, it is just the end of the beginning.”