'Herd Immunity Will End Covid Worries'

An infectious disease expert has said only mass vaccination and herd immunity will open the way for Hong Kong to end coronavirus restrictions, though he cast doubt on the prospect of vaccine passports opening up international travel in the short term.

Speaking on RTHK's Hong Kong Today programme, Benjamin Cowling of the University of Hong Kong said getting 70 percent of the population inoculated with a "highly effective" vaccine would mean an end to Covid-19 worries.

"If we're going to go back to normal it's going to rely on all of us getting vaccinated," he told RTHK's Mike Weeks. "We all know that the risk in the past year hasn't been very high. That's because our success in dealing with Covid.

"But we can't keep all of those measures in place. They're really expensive to keep in place.

"We've got to look for a better solution which is mass vaccination, high coverage of highly effective vaccines, herd immunity. Then we can go back to normal and we don't have to worry about Covid any more."

Asked about the prospect of vaccine passports, amid calls for the government to open talks with other jurisdictions about allowing vaccinated people to travel, Cowling said he was "not convinced".

He said it was possible that, if Hong Kong reached zero cases, it might be possible to open up travel bubbles with other places that had zero cases. However dropping quarantine requirements was unlikely because no vaccine was 100 per cent effective.

He said the BioNTech vaccine had proved highly effective, though the Sinovac shot was less so. So far, more than 230,000 people have been given the Sinovac inoculation while more than 120,000 people have received a BioNTech shot.