In Hong Kong, the number of people dying of Covid 19 disease has risen dramatically in recent days. The omicron wave hits the Chinese special administrative region hard, reports the Financial Times (FT).
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Since omicron was first detected, every corona case in Hong Kong has been 20 to 50 times deadlier than in comparable countries, the report said. Currently, five percent of infections there would end fatally. In Japan and South Korea the percentage is 0.2 percent – in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore it is 0.1 percent. An average of 284 people die from Covid-19 in Hong Kong, the report said.
The reason for the high deaths is the high number of unvaccinated older people, notes the “FT” journalist John Burn-Murdoch on Twitter.
Christian Drosten, virologist at the Berlin Charité, shared Burn-Murdoch’s assessment on Twitter and warned: “Omicron is not mild in unvaccinated older people.”
Vaccination protection is still comparatively low, especially among Hong Kong residents over 80 years of age. More than two-thirds of those in the age group were not fully immunized when the omicron wave began, Burn-Murdoch tweeted. The Financial Times reports that there is sufficient corona vaccine available.
However, the high number of unvaccinated people is not the only problem making Hong Kong’s elderly population so vulnerable to severe Covid-19 sales, the newspaper reports. Most of the vaccinated older Hong Kongers were vaccinated with the Chinese-made vaccine Sinovac. One or two doses of this vaccine provide little protection against omicron, it said.
China reports record new infections
Meanwhile, the Chinese leadership is monitoring the situation in Hong Kong and is calling on the elderly in particular to be vaccinated. Because the People’s Republic is also currently struggling with an omicron wave. A corona curfew applied to almost 30 million people on Tuesday – and yet the authorities set another record for new infections: 5,280 people were infected with the virus within one day, more than twice as many as the day before. This is the highest daily tally since February 2020, when the pandemic began.
The northeastern province of Jilin, on the border with North Korea, has been hardest hit by the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant, which has recorded more than 3,000 cases, according to the National Health Commission. Dozens of domestic flights have been canceled at Beijing and Shanghai airports, according to flight data. Aviation authorities also announced that more than 100 international flights bound for Shanghai will be diverted to other Chinese cities between next week and May 1.
The approximately 17 million inhabitants of the technology metropolis Shenzhen, which is located at the gates of Hong Kong, are completely in lockdown. In the meantime, the number of patients in the hospitals in the special administrative zone is increasing – corpses have to be temporarily stored in containers, the “Financial Times” reports. “We don’t have the knowledge and equipment to fight,” Stephanie Law, a senior executive at the Hong Kong Elderly Care Association, told the newspaper. The scenario is reminiscent of the conditions in Italy or New York at the beginning of the corona pandemic.
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The Financial Times quotes Ben Cowling, professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong, as saying that efforts to vaccinate vulnerable age groups against the corona virus were “too weak and too late”. “We’re catching the wave even though we could have been ahead of it.”
The status of a “Covid-free city” was also problematic, writes the “FT”. As a result, many people would have felt safe and would have decided against vaccination.
The number of deaths among the general population in Hong Kong has now reached a world record. In the past seven days, an average of 36.09 people per million inhabitants died (as of March 11), reports the “Financial Times”. In Germany, the seven-day average on March 12 was 0.25 per 100,000 inhabitants. (Tsp / AFP)
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