Even Stricter Covid-19 Policies Baffles Expert

Hong Kong is closing loopholes in quarantine exemptions

Starting from today, anyone who was infected with Covid-19 and is discharged from hospital, must spend another 14 days in isolation and health monitoring.

The recovered patients will be sent to North Lantau Hospital Hong Kong Infection Control Centre for two weeks.

Beds at the newly opened North Lantau Hospital 

This new rule is one of the ways the Hong Kong government hopes to reopen the border with the mainland, though this latest policy comes into effect as it was revealed there is a shortage of health care staff in public hospitals.

Epidemiologist Ben Cowling of the University of Hong Kong's School of Public Health said the new policy was "ridiculous" and "unethical" on his Twitter posts.

He wrote that the policy was a "waste of resources and actively harming the patient with no community benefit to offset against."

"That makes it unethical surely," he said as he himself is undergoing quarantine. "I hope it doesn't also apply to 're-positives', that would be even more ridiculous."

Cowling, a leading infectious disease expert, added there were no known cases around the world where a recovered, or even a re-positive case, had triggered a community outbreak.

Cowling says extra isolation is "ridiculous"

"The previous policy is that people who have Covid are put in isolation until doctors are confident that they've recovered and they're no longer contagious -- they're no longer a threat -- if they're discharged," he said.

"That's happened more than 10,000 times, throughout more than 10,000 discharged cases back into Hong Kong. There have never been any report of any recovered case triggering a community outbreak and that's the same as the rest of the world."

Meanwhile the Patients' Rights Association, a group advocating medical causes with a focus on underprivileged residents, warned that authorities risked discouraging low-income patients from getting tested for fear of being locked up for a sustained period of time without pay.

"The government should remove economic disincentives for poor people to seek medical help, either in the form of direct subsidies, or by asking the Community Care Fund or charities to step in to help," the association's Tim Pang Hung-cheong said Wednesday.

"The city's low-income residents who are just getting by cannot afford to lose a day's income, and might even lose their jobs due to a long absence from work."

Pang worries low-income earners will lose jobs

This latest policy change is one of several the government has pitched in a bid to ease Beijing's fears and result in reopening the border with the mainland.

Other initiatives include revoking quarantine exemption privileges to people such as diplomats, business executives of listed companies, truck drivers, crew members of fishing vessels, certified accountants, and cruise ship crew.

While there are debates about what the science says and what Hong Kong will do to placate Beijing -- even though it recorded 50 new cases today and Hong Kong has had zero cases for the past 19 days -- it is more and more apparent which strategy the city is leaning towards to keep Covid-19 at bay...