Deaths, not infections, must now be focus

By coincidence or not, two government experts battling Covid pointed to a need to focus the strategy on how to limit deaths as Hong Kong reported another day with hundreds of new cases.

Though Gabriel Leung and Yuen Kwok-yung stopped short of making a formal call to change the current policy, it would make good sense to refocus the strategy on how to achieve zero or near-zero deaths instead of zero infections.

As events have unfolded, both are impossible missions as a number of people have already died and the SAR is being hit by hundreds of cases each day.

However, it would make better sense to strive for a target of near-zero deaths.

Then, vital medical resources could be freed up to meet more cases in urgent need.

It is totally valid to question why patients with either no or mild symptoms are put into hospitals when they can recover readily at home without special medical treatment.

The only rationale in doing so is to keep them from infecting others, but the enormous Omicron wave has rendered this obsolete.

It is time to bring the policy up to date. The health authorities were right to ask that close contacts should be allowed t self-isolate at home instead of spending many nights at Penny's Bay, but perhaps the government can do more on that.

Yesterday, University of Hong Kong microbiologist Yuen suggested patients with no - or merely mild - symptoms should self-isolate at home.

If they have family members who are considered high risk, such as unvaccinated elderly or the chronically ill, these family members may be temporarily relocated to central facilities to protect them from cross-infection.

To be fair to Yuen, his logic has merits, but it could be easier said than done. The real danger is that, once an outbreak occurs at these central facilities, they could easily turn into death camps since no bubble is 100 percent secure.

In a separate development, Leung - dean of HKU's medical school - put forward a more radical idea. He suggested placing the entire city under lockdown for two to three months in order to greatly reduce the potential for deaths.

Leung's team estimated that more than 900 people could die at the end of June if the current situation persists. Their modeling showed that a citywide lockdown of long-enough duration could reduce the death toll to about 115.

Would it be too radical to lock down the city completely for two to three months? The answer is obvious.

However, it is clear from both suggestions that a new policy objective should be set on how to lower deaths rather than adhering to the unrealistic aim of zero infections.

Yuen and Leung seem to agree on this despite their varied approaches and it is worth careful consideration by the administration.

In contrast, a proposal by a group led by lawmaker Tik Chi-yuen to continually test the entire population at the rate of 700,000 a day until the Omicron wave subsides may be well motivated, but the question is: what then after testing?