Monitoring the pandemic | Mainland-style colour coding for us

Front page, South China Morning Post.
Click to enlarge

Omicron BA5 does seem to be more severe, increasing hospitalisations worldwide, and here in Hong Kong. Whether yet more restrictions will help, history will tell. So far, waves and hospitalisation rates appear similar in many countries, no matter the stringency of their measures. We here are at the strong end,  very much so. Tougher than anywhere, including ongoing quarantining. John Campbell discussed it here. Including that current vaccines are only 1/20th as good at creating antibodies against BA.5 as against  the original Wuhan virus. Still good at reducing severity, apparently, just not at stopping it.

ADDED: From Our World in Data, today. For these countries, hospitalisations are 20% of what they were in previous peaks. Will the trend continue up? Or go back down, as has happened before? Who knows? This virus and its variants continues to surprise, sometimes on the upside, sometimes on the downside. Hong Kong doesn’t publish hospitalisation stats that OWID captures. So I’m just going by what they say in articles like the one above. On that basis, it seems that Hong Kong is performing about the same as all these other counties, none of which have anything like the restrictions we have. I’ll go further: Hong Kong Covid waves appear to be independent of our restrictions, many and complex and inconvenient and harmful to the economy as they are.