Hong Kong Invokes Emergency Powers Against Covid-19

Beijing, Feb 24: Hong Kong on Thursday invoked emergency powers to enable doctors and nurses from mainland China to join its efforts to fight the escalation in the number of Omicron cases, Al Jazeera reported. Authorities in Hong Kong on Thursday morning reported 8,674 new Covid cases, nearly all of them locally acquired.

The outbreak is expected to “continue to escalate exponentially and go beyond the epidemic control capacity” of the territory’s administration, officials said. This means that “Hong Kong’s healthcare system, manpower, anti-epidemic facilities and resources, etc will be insufficient to handle the huge number of newly confirmed cases being detected at an alarming rate every day”.

Hong Kong is one of the world’s most densely-populated places with people living in tiny high-rise apartments that make it impossible for people to isolate themselves. It is one of the reasons why Hong Kong has been hit hard by the Omicron wave, which slipped through the defences of its stringent quarantines and contact tracing that had kept the virus at bay since the pandemic began two years ago.