‘A very stupid idea’: Hong Kong frontline medics decry ‘dynamic Covid-zero’ as
“S” was midway through his shift two Sundays ago when he was called to an isolation facility where an 18-month-old baby and her parents – all three of them Covid positive – had been admitted. The toddler was gasping, a high-pitched wheeze filling the negative-pressure room.
“The mum told me she had been like that for two hours,” S, a surgeon in a public hospital’s accident and emergency (A&E) department, said. “But no matter how hard she tried to call for help, nobody answered.”
The baby was taken to the paediatric intensive care unit, a transfer that S said should have happened “after two minutes or maximum 20 minutes, not two hours.” She was suffering from a respiratory illness that could have been life-threatening, he added.
Across Hong Kong, a raging Covid-19 wave has pushed medical facilities to a tipping point. As public hospitals become increasingly overcrowded, frustration has grown among frontline medics who said the government continues to stand by the same Covid-19 policy as two years ago, when little was known about the virus and vaccines were not available.
Under dynamic zero-Covid, politics first
Hong Kong’s fifth wave, fuelled by the much milder Omicron variant, has left frontline health workers scrambling – but not quite to the right places, some medics say.
Resources and manpower are being deployed from hospitals to isolation facilities for patients with minimal symptoms, while inconsistent government messaging has sent healthy Covid-positive patients rushing to emergency units, causing days-long waits for those needing urgent attention.
“People have developed more severe illnesses because they didn’t get the care that they could have,” S said, speaking to HKFP from home isolation after testing positive for Covid-19. He asked to remain anonymous.
Frontline medics told HKFP that the devastation was a result of the city’s zealous pursuit of dynamic Covid-zero, an approach that appears embedded in politics.
Chief Executive Carrie Lam said in January that the dynamic Covid-zero strategy was mainland China’s “requirement,” while state-run media has called the policy – of detecting all potential infections and quarantining them – the “scientific choice” for the city of 7.4 million.
“Everything from vaccination to our zero-Covid policy to the way we triage patients, all of those things have a lot to do with politics,” WK Wong, an internal medicine resident who used an alias, said.
Since the virus emerged, the government has attempted to hospitalise every Covid-19 patient even if they are asymptomatic. That has proved impossible in the face of tens of thousands of daily cases.
But with citywide compulsory testing planned for…
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