The Hong Kong government yesterday invoked emergency powers to allow doctors and nurses from mainland China to work in the territory to help combat an escalating COVID-19 outbreak.
The densely populated territory is in the throes of its worst-ever wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, registering thousands of cases every day, overwhelming hospitals and government efforts to isolate all infected people in dedicated units.
Hong Kong authorities have followed a “zero COVID-19” strategy similar to mainland China, which kept infections mostly at bay throughout the pandemic.
Photo: AFP
However, they were caught flat-footed when the highly infectious Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 broke through those defenses, and have since increasingly called on the Chinese mainland for help.
“Hong Kong is now facing a very dire epidemic situation, which continues to deteriorate rapidly,” the government said in a statement announcing the use of emergency powers.
Mainland Chinese medics are currently not allowed to operate in Hong Kong without passing local exams and licensing regulations.
The emergency powers “exempt certain persons or projects from all relevant statutory requirements ... so as to increase Hong Kong’s epidemic control capacity for containing the fifth wave within a short period of time,” the statement said.
The move came after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) last week ordered Hong Kong to take “any necessary means” to bring the outbreak under control, signaling that the territory would not be allowed to move toward living with the virus like much of the rest of the world.
Allowing mainland medics to work in Hong Kong has been a source of debate for years. Even before the pandemic, supporters said that it could alleviate shortages in the territory’s overstretched healthcare system.
Local medical practitioners have thus far objected, citing issues such as language and cultural barriers — although critics have dismissed such talk as protectionism.
Hong Kong was supposed to operate as a semi-autonomous region from China, after the territory returned from British colonial rule in 1997.
However, that autonomy has been eroded in the past few years, as China crushed a democracy movement.
Hong Kong has recorded more than 62,000 COVID-19 cases in the current wave, compared with just 12,000 during the two previous years.
Health experts fear that the real number is far higher because of a testing backlog and people avoiding testing for fear of being forced into isolation units if they are positive.
About 1,200 healthcare workers had as of Wednesday been infected, the Hong Kong Hospital Authority said.
Hospital Authority Chairman Henry Fan (范鴻齡) on Monday told state media that he hoped Beijing would send doctors and nurses, because the local workforce had been “exhausted”.
Hong Kong has ordered all 7.4 million residents to next month go through three rounds of mandatory COVID-19 testing.
China is helping to build a series of isolation units and temporary hospital wards, but it is unclear whether enough can be constructed.
Local modeling predicted that the territory might see as many as 180,000 daily cases and 100 deaths by the middle of next month.
China is increasingly ruling Hong Kong by fiat.
In the past two years, the Chinese legislature imposed a sweeping National Security Law and a political restructure on the territory in response to huge democracy protests.
Local authorities have also increasingly resorted to emergency orders. During the 2019 protests, authorities used such powers to ban mask wearing. The following year, emergency orders were used to make mask wearing mandatory during the pandemic.
Hong Kong’s disease prevention law has also been invoked to forbid public gatherings, and to impose a host of strict social distancing measures and business closure orders that have been in place on and off for two years.
Last week, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) also invoked emergency powers to delay the selection of the territory’s next leader, citing the pandemic.
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