My piece published today. ‘Hong Kong’s coronavirus mass testing results support full reopening of city‘

Barbecue pits closed at Repulse Bay, when outdoors
is safest place to be

Here on the SCMP website. 

Yet there’s panic talk of a “Fourth wave” in Hong Kong and talk of further lockdowns. Arrivals at Hong Kong airport are down 99.99%. Consider that! From 50 million a year to 48,000. What happens when we reopen?  More infections for sure. Then another lockdown? We simply have to get used to the fact that the virus is here to stay and we must live with it, we protect the elderly and vulnerable, we urged cleanliness and so on… but for the rest get on with life and living. 

ADDED: Tim Black looks at we how handled two previous pandemics. The Asian flu of 1957-58 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968-70 (which I kind of remember through the purple haze of dope and dames as I “studied” at the Australian National Uni). Both affected tens of millions and killed millions. In neither did we panic as we’re doing now. 

Click to enlarge

 

ADDED (21 September): there is more talk that our government is after a “Zero virus” policy  if so, we’re in for ongoing ruination… Oxford U professor Carl Heneghan points out a Zero virus policy is at once  impossible and dangerous. Zero Covid makes zero sense 

Text of my letter below the fold…

Hong Kong has tested a fifth of our population and found 

32 new infections

. What now?

I simply do not understand how this helps us. Sure, we can extrapolate that we have around 160 infected people overall in Hong Kong. So what? Other than the fact that it seems remarkably few.

I presume one “benefit” is that 32 people were quarantined and with the 

reproduction rate

 of the virus in Hong Kong at less than 1, we have avoided 32 other people being infected. Given that the scheme cost 

HK$530 million

 (US$68 million), or HK$16.5 million per infected case that turned up, we could have shipped each person off to a villa in the Maldives for a fraction of the cost.

Let us have some sense of proportion. Last year, we lost 

over 10,000

 fellow residents to Covid-19-like diseases such as pneumonia and lower respiratory infections. These are also avoidable through lockdowns, distancing, masking and the rest. But we do not tie ourselves in knots to do so for diseases that are 100 times deadlier.

I await with interest the government telling us what it has achieved by mass testing.

I must say I do not understand why we have decimated our economy and savaged our society for a disease we now know is most assuredly not the existential threat we feared. End lockdowns now!

Peter Forsythe, Discovery Bay