Covid: How Hong Kong's Deadly Outbreak Was Avoidable

For over 2 years, Hong Kong was able to largely keep Covid out. But as of March 2022, the city's Covid-19 fatality rate became the highest in the developed world amid a wave of deaths among its under-vaccinated elderly population. Images of chaotic, overflowing hospitals and body bags stacked next to living patients. This has become the dark reality in a city living through one of the deadliest outbreaks of the entire pandemic.

Hong Kong’s situation is the product of several specific policy failures, which stem partly from Beijing’s decision to take greater control of the financial hub after 2019’s pro-democracy protests. Above all, the city’s government utterly failed at vaccinating older adults, botching public-education campaigns and allowing misinformation about the shots to run rampant among those residents.

Hong Kong took a hypertransparent approach to publishing information about Covid cases, publicly identifying every location visited by a person who later tested positive—on the theory that these details would prompt people who’d been in the same places to monitor their health. More unusually, it did something similar with vaccine side effects, proactively publicizing the handful of deaths and adverse events that occurred after someone had been vaccinated, whether or not there was reason to believe the shot had caused them. The result was a frenzy of anxious media coverage, with newspapers regularly speculating that the vaccines were harmful.

Hong Kong was experiencing a dark period even before the current outbreak. The government’s uncompromising enforcement of the new National Security Law, which effectively bans political opposition, had hollowed out the media and civil society, draining the vitality of a famously freewheeling place. It’s now tipped into a full-blown civic crisis, with large numbers of residents leaving and major employers scrambling to relocate operations to places that are living with Covid more successfully. The damage to the city’s reputation as a business hub may be permanent.

Hong Kong is still reporting hundreds of Covid deaths each day, overwhelmingly among unvaccinated older people. It remains unclear, however, how Hong Kong can move toward substantially looser policies without a similar shift occurring on the mainland.

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