What Happened to Hong Kong?

March 17, 2022

(The Atlantic) – Now medical facilities are overwhelmed with sick patients, and because morgues have struggled to keep pace, body bags are piled up in hospitals alongside patients still receiving treatment. Coffins are being shipped in to meet the demand. Construction workers are racing to build isolation facilities, including one that looks like a wartime field hospital on the border with the mainland. Some 300,000 people are in isolation or under home quarantine. After recording only 213 deaths and about 13,000 cases of COVID-19 from January 2020 to early 2022, the city is swamped by the current Omicron wave, which began at the start of the year and has led to more than 960,000 cases and more than 4,600 deaths. Hong Kong was lauded for controlling the coronavirus’s spread with its “zero-COVID strategy.” It has ample vaccine doses. It is wealthy enough to support its poorest people if it chooses to. It has effectively shut down swaths of its economy, including its lucrative tourism sector, to battle the virus. And yet this month, it recorded one of the highest COVID death rates in the world. What just happened? (Read More)