Amid a terrifying deterioration in the local COVID-19 pandemic situation that is threatening to cause significant loss of life as well as the collapse of the city’s public healthcare system, nothing can be more reassuring for Hong Kong residents than President Xi Jinping’s instructions that reining in the coronavirus shall be the top priority of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government at the moment, and that the central government and local governments on the Chinese mainland shall throw their full support behind the special administrative region’s anti-pandemic efforts.
Big cities on the mainland like Wuhan, Xi’an, Nanjing and Guangzhou, each having a population of over 10 million, have managed to stop the spread of the disease by nipping the outbreak during the incubation period with a series of decisive actions, particularly the implementation of universal nucleic acid testing throughout the whole city.
Hong Kong, a city of only 7.5 million residents, is now in a similar situation as these cities once were in at the beginning of a new wave of viral attacks. However, Hong Kong is facing the predicament of being too slow to catch up with the raging speed of viral transmission as a result of the bottlenecks it unfortunately faces — an insufficiency in anti-pandemic resources of various kinds.
Ferocious as the fifth wave of the COVID-19 outbreak is, Hong Kong can defeat it with the strong backing of the central government, which once again proved that it can be counted on whenever Hong Kong is in need of a helping hand
Take the nucleic acid testing, which is crucial to contain the outbreak by effectively tracing and thus cutting the hidden transmission chains, as an example. The city’s current capacity allows for conducting only 100,000 COVID-19 tests per day, which means it will take a total of 75 days to perform a citywide virus screening campaign for all of its 7.5 million residents, rendering the process useless in stopping the spread of the virus.
In contrast, it took the above-mentioned mainland cities only three to five days to complete a citywide virus screening campaign, which is the key to nipping a new outbreak in its bud, i.e., within its incubation period. Two years into the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, dozens of localized outbreaks have erupted across the mainland, and yet the mainland authorities have never failed to contain an outbreak within its incubation period, which ranged from one week to as long as a month.
In the absence of an effective citywide nucleic acid testing campaign, Hong Kong’s health authority has been struggling to cope with an overwhelming amount of untraceable transmission chains in a way akin to soldiers trying to dodge bullets fired by invisible enemies from all directions on a battlefield.
The predicament has been aggravated by the insufficiency in both the quarantine facilities and hospital beds for COVID-19 patients, creating the undesirable situation of necessitating home quarantine for thousands of close contacts of confirmed cases and leaving many COVID-19-positive people waiting for a hospital bed for days at home. This poor situation is facilitating the spread of the virus, as evidenced by the exponential increase in new infections over the past few days.
Given that ramping up Hong Kong’s anti-pandemic capacity is the key to containing the fifth wave of the COVID-19 outbreak, it is reassuring that the relevant central government departments and the authorities in Guangdong province have sprung into action, assisting the SAR government in various aspects of the fight against the COVID-19 virus, as revealed by Vice-Premier Han Zheng.
The mainland’s assistance focuses on improving Hong Kong’s virus-screening capacity, providing medical supplies such as the rapid antigen test kits, building makeshift community isolation and treatment facilities, ensuring the supply of daily necessities, and dispatching medical experts and supporting staff to the city, all of which are conducted under an anti-pandemic work coordination mechanism, which is led by the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council and the National Health Commission involving central government departments, the Guangdong provincial government and the HKSAR government.
The success of the mainland’s anti-pandemic efforts lies not only on comprehensive, strategic planning but also on the ability to mobilize assistance from across the country. Once an outbreak occurred in a certain place, a large number of medical personnel and a huge volume of supplies were marshaled and then dispatched to that area in no time. As a result, sufficient medical staff were deployed, who worked in shifts so that each sampling point could perform testing 24/7; and sufficient quarantine and treatment facilities were made available to accommodate every close contact or confirmed patient. Meanwhile, a volunteer team consisting of local Communist Party members, community organizers, ordinary citizens, etc., was assembled to serve the various needs of the community so that local residents could easily observe the quarantine rules. This countrywide response and cooperation facilitated an overwhelming power or synergy that helped the affected area win the race against the coronavirus soon enough to prevent a large-scale outbreak.
Ferocious as the fifth wave of the COVID-19 outbreak is, Hong Kong can defeat it with the strong backing of the central government, which once again proved that it can be counted on whenever Hong Kong is in need of a helping hand, such as during the water crisis in the 1960s, the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, and now the COVID-19 pandemic.
The author is a Hong Kong member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and chairman of the Hong Kong New Era Development Thinktank.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.