How Hong Kong’s ‘zero covid’ policy backfired
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 15 March 2022
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
Since the omicron outbreak began a few months ago, 10 times as many people have died in Hong Kong as in the previous two years. Today on Post Reports, how Hong Kong’s “zero covid” policy led to a devastating surge.
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Body bags, overflowing morgues and chaotic hospitals. Hong Kong — a wealthy financial center — now has the highest covid-19 death rate in the developed world. More than 4,000 people have died since the start of the city’s most recent outbreak, compared with just 213 in the two years prior. Those dying are overwhelmingly elderly, unvaccinated residents, but they also include toddlers and children too young to be immunized.
Shibani Mahtani reports from Hong Kong on how the city has gone from “zero covid” to a catastrophe.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So Shibani, describe for me what it is like in Hong Kong right now. |
| 0:09.7 | I really do think that the most surreal part of all of this is that we're washing the |
| 0:14.8 | world open up while we are experiencing COVID for the first time in many ways. |
| 0:21.0 | That Shibani Matani, she is the post bureau chief in Hong Kong where the COVID death rate |
| 0:26.3 | is currently the highest in the developed world. And meanwhile in the US and other countries, |
| 0:32.2 | people are returning to normal life. |
| 0:35.0 | And so people are going back to their life, they're planning weddings, they're planning |
| 0:39.2 | travel, they're doing all these things for the first time in two years and we are for |
| 0:43.8 | the first time in two years seeing, you know, morgues pile up and, you know, thinking, |
| 0:50.2 | what do we do if we get sick because we can't go to the hospital because they've all |
| 0:52.8 | been converted to COVID wards, right? And I think it's caused a lot of anxiety, it's caused |
| 0:57.2 | people to feel very, very trapped and it's caused people to feel like really there's |
| 1:01.5 | no future here because this failure in government policy has made it this way. |
| 1:08.4 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports, I'm Martine Powers. It's |
| 1:13.9 | Tuesday, March 15th. Today, how Hong Kong's COVID response has become a victim of its own |
| 1:20.9 | success. |
| 1:21.9 | Early in the pandemic, Hong Kong was forced to adopt Beijing's policy of fully eradicating |
| 1:41.0 | COVID, what's called the zero COVID policy. But unlike China, Hong Kong doesn't have the |
| 1:47.5 | authoritarian style of government that allows for strict lockdowns and required vaccinations. |
| 1:53.5 | So when the Omakwan variant came along, the vast majority of older people were unvaccinated. |
| 1:59.5 | So almost 4,000 people now have died from COVID here in Hong Kong, most of them elderly. |
| 2:05.4 | And so that's actually a bigger number than the total number of people who died in Wuhan |
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