What does it feel like in Hong Kong right now?

I would say for the last month, it has been a very challenging month in a number of different dimensions.

Dr. Karen Greppen teaches public health at the University of Hong Kong and studies health care systems.

And right now, her city is in a massive COVID wave, something that Hong Kong had managed to avoid for months,

even while the U.S. and other parts of the world were battered by Omicron and Delta.

Even Hong Kong's previous waves were pretty light.

In January, Hong Kong was averaging fewer than 100 cases a day. By the start of this month, that had climbed to 50,000. Hong Kong now

has one of the highest COVID death rates in the world. It's been incredibly frightening for

many people to finally realize that everybody is getting

a disease that we have been fearing for so long.

And so, you know, the estimates now suggest that maybe upwards of half of the city has already

become infected, and that really happened in the last two or three weeks.

With so many people infected and needing care, Hong Kong's hospitals are struggling.

And so this has translated into, you know, pictures in the newspapers every day of bodies

literally piling up on the roads, bodies piling up inside of the treatment centers in the hospital wards themselves.

Greppin says people are terrified about what might come next,

mass testing, followed by lockdowns,

as the government tries to get case levels down to zero.

We've seen, for example, panic buying, people basically buying up everything they can in the

grocery stores because we know that in the mainland, when they do these testing schemes,

they've almost always been associated with prolonged lockdowns.

And then the second thing that's happening as a result is really a lot of people leaving the city.

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