Opinion | Why fall in public trust, not obesity or pollution, drove Hong Kong’s surge in Covid-19 deaths
- Hong Kong’s performance in handling the pandemic is admirable on a global scale but anomalous compared to its peers in East Asia
- Several factors have been suggested as explaining the city’s unusually high number of deaths, but the evidence points to poor levels of public trust
What has become increasingly clear across the world since the outset of pandemic is that national policy is seldom the prime factor in determining Covid-19 levels. Income per head and consequent age distributions are of particular statistical significance.
Generally, rich nations have had far more cases of Covid-19 than other countries. Europe and the United States represent about 15 per cent of world population but have contributed more than 50 per cent of global Covid-19 cases. The exception to this grand global divergence remains high-income East Asia with its low overall Covid-19 case numbers.
However, in focusing on Hong Kong we might say that while the city has been more effective in fighting the pandemic than Europe and the US in general, its performance within East Asia is not exceptional.
Hong Kong’s registered deaths per million from Covid-19 stand at about 1,370. This is significantly high within East Asia, where the range of the other four advanced East Asia economies excluding mainland China lies between 302 and 557.
