Hong Kong’s outbreak of COVID-19 has been so deadly that more people have died in the territory than the official death toll in the whole of mainland China. The grim number is likely to continue climbing for weeks.
Almost 95 percent of those deaths came in the past month, as Hong Kong’s outbreak of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 swept through the territory, filling mortuaries and possibly infecting half of its 7.4 million residents.
Although the outbreak appears to have peaked early this month, deaths are expected to keep rising, as they lag infections and the virus continues to spread through some of the territory’s most vulnerable care homes.
Photo: AFP
Hong Kong’s situation is not completely comparable with that on the mainland, as Chinese government data likely undercounted deaths in Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei Province in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, with Hong Kong’s population barely 0.5 percent of the mainland’s 1.4 billion, the soaring toll shows how serious this problem is not only for the Hong Kong government, but for also Beijing.
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