Hong Kong is to proceed with relaxing COVID-19 curbs despite recording hundreds of cases a day, as the territory’s virus policy drifts further from Beijing’s “zero COVID-19” approach.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) yesterday said that the territory would roll back social distancing measures tomorrow as previously announced, including opening bars and extending the hours for restaurants to serve customers.
“It is reasonable to have 200 to 300 cases each day,” Lam said at a regular weekly briefing. “We don’t need to worry too much. It is also our assessment that we can safely enter the second phase of easing social distancing measures.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
From tomorrow, dining at restaurants is to be extended to midnight, bars will be permitted to open until 2am and mask requirements for indoor exercise will be lifted.
Lam continued to cite reopening the border with mainland China as one of her government’s top priorities, without saying how that would happen.
Shanghai, China’s most-populous city and one of the nation’s major economic engines, is slowly exiting a lockdown that confined 25 million people to their homes for six weeks as Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sticks with the nation’s strict “zero COVID-19” policy.
The trigger for easing in Shanghai was reporting zero infections outside the city’s extensive quarantine program.
That is a far cry from the situation in Hong Kong, where hundreds of new cases are still being reported daily.
Instead, Hong Kong officials are focusing on driving up the territory’s vaccination rate to prevent a spike in serious illness that could overwhelm hospitals.
By the end of this month, all eligible residents will need to have had three vaccine doses to use Hong Kong’s Vaccine Pass, a requirement to enter restaurants and many public places.
The May 31 deadline was moved up from June 30, as local officials push to boost the territory’s vaccination rate. Just over half of Hong Kong’s eligible residents have received their third jab, government data showed.
Hong Kong still lags much of the world in its return to normalcy, with the territory maintaining mandatory seven-day hotel quarantines for vaccinated incoming travelers.
JPMorgan Chase & Co chief executive officer for Asia-Pacific Filippo Gori told Bloomberg TV yesterday in an interview that it was important that Hong Kong “keeps on moving on the relaxation process,” citing border controls as the next measure officials should ease.
“If we could have home quarantine, from a business standpoint, it would make an enormous difference because it would remove a lot of stress,” Gori said.
The attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump by a shooter at a rally in Pennsylvania has confirmed the worst fears of public figures warning that an escalation in incendiary political rhetoric on all sides could lead to bloodshed. US lawmakers and analysts have been voicing concern since the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot that increasingly bellicose campaign language was becoming a worrying contusion on the US body politic ahead of November’s presidential election. The danger was vividly illustrated in 2022, when then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist
A high-ranking North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba defected to South Korea in November last year — just months before Seoul and Havana established diplomatic ties, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said yesterday. North Korean diplomat Ri Il-kyu had been responsible for political affairs at Pyongyang’s embassy in Cuba since 2019, tasked specifically “with obstructing the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba,” South Korea’s Chosun Daily reported. Ri defected to South Korea with his wife and children in early November, making him the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat known to have defected since then-North Korean deputy ambassador to the
Hong Kong microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung (袁國勇) has done battle with some of the world’s worst threats, including the SARS virus he helped isolate and identify, and he has a warning. Another pandemic is inevitable and could exact damage far worse than COVID-19 pandemic, said the soft-spoken scientist sometimes thought of as Hong Kong’s answer to former US National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci. “Both the public and [world] leaders must admit that another pandemic will come, and probably sooner than you anticipate,” he said at the city’s Queen Mary Hospital, where he works and teaches. “Why I make such a horrifying prediction
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was