Hong Kong’s success in fending off COVID comes back to haunt

By ALICE FUNG and ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL
Associated Press

HONG KONG (AP) — For two years, Hong Kong successfully insulated most of its residents from COVID-19, even going nearly three months late last year without a single locally spread case. Then the omicron variant showed up. The fast-spreading mutation breached Hong Kong’s defenses and has been spreading rapidly through one of the world’s most densely populated places, overflowing hospitals and isolation wards and prompting desperate measures to test the entire 7.4 million population and hastily build six isolation and treatment centers. The surge shows what happens when COVID-19 spreads through a population unprotected by immunity from previous infections, and has exposed a low vaccination rate among elderly citizens who are bearing the brunt of the crisis.