HK Must Get Used To New 'normal': Ben Cowling

An epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong says experts advising the government have had to help policy makers “separate facts from fiction”.

Ben Cowling, head of the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics of the University of Hong Kong's School of Public Health, made the remarks on RTHK’s Letter to Hong Kong.

He cited a letter he wrote to the late Anthony Hedley, one of the scholars who set up a research team at HKU following the SARS outbreak in 2003. He said his team hadn't anticipated this particular problem, but did not go into details:

"You taught us that public health policies should be based on scientific evidence, and we have been doing our best to provide the evidence that the government can use to make wise decisions," Cowling said.

"Six months ago, most people wouldn't even know what an epidemiologist does. Now everybody is an epidemiologist. One of the particular problems we faced, which we did not anticipate, is how to help policy makers and the public separate facts from fiction."

But he said thanks to experience from the SARS outbreak, and research done over the past years, his team has made recommendations to the government on how to respond to Covid.

He added that various infection control measures as well as people's vigilance have so far worked "pretty well" to keep the coronavirus at bay. However, Cowling warned that it's not yet the time to let our guards down.

"As we go forward, we will be living in a new normal. We may have to implement population-wide social distancing measures intermittently over the next year, until, hopefully, vaccines can provide the herd immunity that we need to allow us to get back to something like the normal life as we knew it, before 2020," Cowling said.

"There is no doubt in my mind that we will be living in a new normal after all this is over."