Bring Back Tough Anti-epidemic Rules: Yuen Kwok-yung

Yuen Kwok-yung, a government advisor on the pandemic, said on Sunday that the current outbreak of Covid-19 infections here could be contained if July's stringent anti-epidemic rules were re-introduced.

The University of Hong Kong microbiologist told a Commercial Radio programme the current wave of infections was to be expected because measures at the border were not “perfect”, and some people in restaurants and bars did not abide by the anti-epidemic rules.

But he said, if the government stepped up social distancing rules as soon as possible, infection numbers would start falling in one to two weeks, though he refused to say whether dining in restaurants should be banned again.

“It’s impossible to predict now whether dining in restaurants needs to be banned completely or just during dinner hours. The government and the [catering] sector obviously have difficulties doing that,” he said.

“Hong Kong has managed to eradicate the virus strains in all [previous] waves of outbreak, without locking down the city or citywide compulsory testing. But current measures to prevent imported and local cases are not perfect. If they are done to 100 percent, Hong Kong can achieve zero infections.”

He warned that insufficient anti-epidemic efforts at the border could lead to a new wave of local infections, caused by a virus strain from the United States and Europe.

He noted that many travellers flying into Hong Kong weren’t aware they could not eat or drink two hours before giving their saliva samples, and there were no markings on the bottles to show a minimum of 4 millilitres of deep-throat saliva was needed.

The infectious disease expert urged people not to go out and celebrate Christmas in restaurants and bars, saying we are “just halfway through the Covid-19 marathon”.

Yuen also called on people to be patient while waiting for a vaccine and to let people in overseas countries get the jabs first, as there was no latest clinical data from authoritative medical literature.