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Opinion | Hong Kong-mainland border reopening: what if Covid-19 containment fails?
- Reopening the border is a delicate process that must take into account public health, political pressures and international considerations
- An outbreak caused by reopened borders would be a public health and political disaster for both sides, so managing such an eventuality must be part of any plan
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Hong Kong’s new administration has said that reopening the border with the mainland was one of its top priorities. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu also told the public that the administration is working with mainland authorities to open the border.
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He said Hong Kong would seek to lower the daily number of new cases through more testing to stop local transmission. In the meantime, Lee said, efforts to reopen the mainland border would not stop the city from opening up to the rest of the world.
Now is a good time for the city to make such efforts. Local business leaders have been calling for a reopening of the mainland border for the past two years. As the mainland relaxes some of its restrictions on international travellers, appropriate measures by Hong Kong could help gain the confidence of mainland public health experts, and show that reopening the border would not threaten China’s “zero-Covid” policy.
The real problem is still how to convince mainland officials that Hong Kong will not pose a threat to public health even as the city reports around 2,000 new Covid-19 cases per day, with no sign that things will change any time soon.
Though Covid-19 appears to be moving from the pandemic phase to endemic in the city, this does not mean the number of daily new cases will naturally decline to zero. In the US, where Covid-19 is becoming endemic, there is still a significant number of new cases each day, but the mortality rate is low. Hong Kong has reached this stage.
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However, the priority for mainland authorities is to avoid importing any cases. For a place where most of the population has not experienced a severe outbreak, it is hard to assess whether herd immunity has been achieved.
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