No Justification For Restricting Arrivals: Cowling

University of Hong Kong epidemiologist Benjamin Cowling says he sees no justification for maintaining restrictions on people arriving in Hong Kong as officials prepare to allow overseas visitors into the SAR from Sunday.

Speaking on RTHK's Hong Kong Today programme on Monday, Cowling, from HKU's School of Public Health, said one reason given for maintaining control measures – keeping new variants out of the SAR – was not likely to be achieved.

"The one thing I've heard about as a reason for keeping travel measures in place is keeping, maybe, new variants out of Hong Kong," he told RTHK's Janice Wong

"We've had BA.2, there's now BA.4, BA.5 in some other parts of the world, maybe there'll be something else in the future. But we have to recognise that the travel restrictions won't stop new variants from getting into Hong Kong.

"Look at what happened with the fifth wave: BA.2 got into the city pretty quickly and it wasn't even the first opportunity that it had. So in my opinion travel restrictions could actually be relaxed at any time. I don't think there's any justification for them at present."

Under the latest relaxation of measures, fully vaccinated non-residents will be allowed to fly into Hong Kong as long as they give a negative PCR test before departure. Like residents, they'll have to quarantine in a hotel for a week.

Flight suspension rules will also be eased. Airlines will be banned from operating a flight for only five days instead of seven, and the threshold for triggering a suspension will also be raised. Bans will only apply if five or more infected passengers, or five percent – whichever is higher – test positive.

Cowling said the changes did not go far enough, adding that only a handful of infected people were flying in at a time when hundreds of people were contracting the virus locally each day.

He said he hoped for a relaxation of the need for testing and vaccination for travellers.

Speaking on another RTHK show, government vaccine adviser Ivan Hung said health authorities could think about further easing or even scrapping the flight suspension mechanism.

He said the level of immunity in the community, as well as the testing and quarantine requirements for incoming travellers, already offer enough protection.

Suspending flights due to imported cases wouldn't be meaningful unless new Covid variants appear, he said.

Hung's University of Hong Kong colleague, Ho Pak-leung, echoed these views, saying flight suspensions no longer play a major role when Hong Kong is resuming normal daily life.

Ho said the authorities could always resume the suspension mechanism when there are signs of danger, such as a rise in severe Covid cases and the emergence of new variants overseas.