The New York Times

By Vivian Wang and Austin Ramzy Published Feb. 16, 2022

Hong Kong Can’t Live With the Virus. It Can’t Stop It, Either.
An Omicron surge has exposed the weaknesses of a system that was once a world
leader in containing the coronavirus.
HONG KONG — The scenes were straight out of China’s coronavirus playbook.
Armies of workers, deployed to lock down residents. Plans to erect a massive
makeshift hospital. And on Wednesday, a command from Xi Jinping, the country’s
top leader, plastered across local front pages: “Make controlling the epidemic as
soon as possible an overwhelming priority.”
The site of the latest outbreak, though, was not mainland China, but neighboring
Hong Kong. And unlike on the mainland, where the government’s lofty language
has been followed by quick results, no such relief is in sight.
As Hong Kong sinks under its worst wave yet of the coronavirus, overwhelmed
hospitals have left patients waiting on sidewalks. People have stood in testing lines
that wind across parks and soccer fields. Cases are still growing exponentially, as
officials opt for targeted lockdowns rather than a citywide one. Researchers have
warned that by summer the latest wave could kill nearly 1,000 people — more than
four times the number that have died of Covid in Hong Kong over the past two
years.
The city’s flailing response has exposed a crucial weakness in its ability to handle
the coronavirus. Unlike other places facing a surge of the Omicron variant, Hong
Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese city, cannot choose to live with the virus;
Beijing continues to demand local elimination. But the city, which retains certain
freedoms unheard-of in the mainland, also cannot wield Beijing’s full authoritarian
tool kit or nearly unlimited manpower to stamp out transmission at any cost.
Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, has struggled even to define the term that the
government uses to describe its approach, “dynamic zero.
“‘Dynamic zero’ — I admit this is a policy requirement of the mainland,” she told
reporters last month. “But I am not the initiator, so if you want an authoritative
definition of ‘dynamic,’ I’m sorry, I really can’t explain it.”
At its core, the city’s crisis reflects the limitations of its unique political model.
Health experts have pointed out that certain measures, such as citywide mandatory
testing, would be impractical in Hong Kong, and could also stir anger in a public
already deeply distrustful of the government. But as Beijing exerts ever-tighter
control over Hong Kong, through a national security law and sweeping crackdown
on dissent, those considerations may start to carry less weight.
Some have called Hong Kong’s willingness to embrace tougher restrictions a
proxy for its loyalty to Beijing.
“The loopholes and oscillation in Hong Kong’s antivirus strategy show that some
officials have not met the requirements for ‘firm patriotism,’” said Tian Feilong, a
law professor at Beijing’s Beihang University who studies Hong Kong.
Last month, the Hong Kong government was forced to clarify that it was legal to
make “general remarks and discussion” about the effectiveness of dynamic zero,
after Junius Ho, a pro-Beijing lawmaker, suggested that questioning it could
violate the security law.
Meanwhile, the public health toll continues to grow. Some 12,000 people who
have tested positive are still waiting to be admitted to a hospital or isolation unit,
according to government figures. After five months with no Covid deaths, Hong
Kong has recorded at least 21 over the past week, including a 3-year-old girl and a
100-year-old woman on Tuesday.
Until this wave, Hong Kong kept the coronavirus largely in check. The city’s
combination of tight social distancing rules and aggressive contact tracing meant
that the previous four waves of infection were curbed relatively quickly. For much
of 2021, the city recorded no local cases. But the highly transmissible Omicron
variant assaulted the cracks in the city’s defenses.
The first local Omicron transmissions were traced to two flight attendants who
returned from abroad in December. A bigger Omicron cluster was connected to a
woman who was infected while in hotel quarantine after returning from Pakistan.
The woman passed the virus to her husband, who spread it to a cleaner at a vast
housing development. Hong Kong locked down a half-dozen buildings and tested
37,000 people last month after more than 100 people there tested positive.
The virus has now spread to more than 20 senior homes and care facilities,
highlighting another weakness in Hong Kong’s preparations. While more than 84
percent of people over age 11 have had at least one shot of a vaccine, among those
70 and older, the proportion is just 56 percent.
“In a way we were a victim of our own success because the fatality rate and the
infection rate were pretty good until recently,” said Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing
lawmaker who was speaking by phone from self-quarantine after her driver tested
positive. “Older people thought they didn’t need to be vaccinated because there
could be complications. And the government was hesitant. We have avoided
vaccine mandates.”
As the outbreak grew, Mrs. Lam at first tried to draw a clear line between Hong
Kong and the mainland, even as she pledged to adhere to dynamic zero. It would
be impractical to invite mainland workers to carry out door-to-door testing, she
said this month, in part because of language differences; the primary language in
Hong Kong is Cantonese, not the Mandarin used in the mainland. Mrs. Lam also
rejected calls from pro-Beijing lawmakers to introduce mandatory universal
testing, defending the more targeted operations.
“If we give up this effective, focused testing work and rashly follow other places to
conduct so-called community testing, I will not bear the consequences,” she said.
“Anti-epidemic work is not a slogan.”
“The Hong Kong government just follows instructions from Beijing, but they are
still hesitant to go full throttle, to go all the way,” said Willy Lam, an adjunct
professor of politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “They know that
most people in Hong Kong don’t trust the Chinese way of doing things.”
But in recent weeks, as the outbreak has spiraled out of control, calls for Hong
Kong to draw closer to the mainland strategy have grown. China’s state news
agency and official Communist Party mouthpiece both published commentaries
this month warning against any suggestion of living with the virus.
Shiu Sin-por, a former Hong Kong government adviser, accused Mrs. Lam of
“one-sidedly emphasizing the differences between Hong Kong and the mainland.”
He wrote in an opinion column, “Hong Kong’s methods are nondescript, half-
baked and full of loopholes, which led to this outbreak.”
Others have been more explicit about the political implications. Professor Tian, in
Beijing, blamed Hong Kong’s failures to control the virus on officials overly
influenced by the West.
In written responses to questions, Professor Tian said the latest outbreak showed
that “the Hong Kong government still has some insufficiently loyal or two-faced
officials,” even after the security law.
He added: “There should be further steps to eliminate them from the system.”
The political pressure, coupled with the deteriorating public health situation, seems
to have had an effect. Over the weekend, Hong Kong officials traveled to
Shenzhen, across the border, to set up joint task forces with officials there. The
task forces will work to increase testing capacity and build makeshift isolation
facilities, like the ones used in China, the government said.
On Wednesday, Beijing announced that it would also assign central government
officials, in addition to the regional ones, to help oversee Hong Kong’s outbreak.
But even pro-Beijing figures acknowledge that Hong Kong cannot copy the
mainland model outright. When the authorities this month locked down Baise, a
city of about 3.6 million in southwestern China, after a flare-up of several dozen
cases, they deployed 38,000 Communist Party members and workers to patrol
neighborhoods and coordinate supplies, according to the local government. Such
networks are a longstanding part of the mainland’s social controls. Hong Kong has
more than twice as many residents and no such network.
“We lack enough organization, mobilization and control capabilities, and we also
lack a strong government,” said Lau Siu-Kai, an adviser to Beijing in Hong Kong.
Hong Kongers could also prove fiercely resistant to a citywide lockdown. When
Mrs. Lam visited a locked-down housing estate last month, residents showered her
with insults from their windows — a display of public dissent rarely seen since the
imposition of the security law.
The government has hesitated to introduce more invasive contact tracing apps such
as exist in the mainland, in part because of residents’ privacy concerns.
But some worry that the authorities will use the latest outbreak as an opportunity to
push through more surveillance measures, Professor Lam said. Trust in the Hong
Kong and Beijing governments “is quite low,” he said.
Health experts say the political debate has overshadowed the grim medical reality.
Between low vaccination rates among older people and the slowness to impose
lockdowns, the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon, no matter what path
Hong Kong adopts, said Siddharth Sridhar, a virologist at the University of Hong
Kong.
“Hong Kong is moving too late,” he said. “We don’t have any good options.”
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