Well, Hong Kong has finally abandoned the requirement to wear masks.  You may remember that people in Hong Kong started wearing masks back in January 2020, though initially the government was absolutely not in favour of this (having made it illegal a few months ago during that thing we don't talk about anymore). It was…

Hong Kong has one of the best COVID vaccines (Comirnaty from BioNTech in Germany) freely available.  Or if an mRNA vaccine with 91.3% efficacy isn’t to your liking, you’re in luck because the Sinovac vaccine, with an efficacy rate of just 50.7% is also available.  Political theatre is never far away and all true patriots…

The latest cluster of cases in Hong Kong comes from…dance clubs.   Who'd have guessed that a lot of people not wearing masks in an enclosed space could cause the spread of COVID-19?   Well, maybe anyone who remembered the several large clusters earlier in the year from banquets where groups of people were dancing without masks. …

So, how’s it going on another very hot (and wet) day in Hong Kong? Hongkongers dine on the roadside [Hong Kong Free Press] Across the city, Hongkongers were forced to eat outdoors as the government ban on dine-in services at restaurants kicked in. Photos from local media and the internet showed many people – especially…

It’s the sixth day in a row with over 100 COVID-19 cases in Hong Kong.  These seem like quite unusual stats.  We don’t have exponential growth, and this isn’t really “flattening the curve” because that usually comes after weeks of growth.  But whatever we call it, 1100+ cases in the last 2 weeks is obviously…

So here we are on Day HowLongHasThisBeenGoingOn of COVID-19. Things in Hong Kong have changed significantly recently with 500 new cases in the last two weeks, mostly locally transmitted and many of unknown origin. Things are particularly bad in East Kowloon.  There were 40+ cases in restaurants in Tsz Wan Shan Shopping Centre and 50+…

Hong Kong had gone for 23 days without any locally transmitted cases of COVID-19, and was within sight of the totally arbitrary milestone of 28 days.  That’s “two incubation periods”, because, obviously that’s twice as good as “one incubation period” (the normal maximum time between becoming infected and having symptoms).  Except that the incubation period…

For the third day in a row, there are no new COVID-19 cases in Hong Kong.  Things already seem to be returning to normal, with more people out and about at the weekend.  The rules on restaurants capacity have been removed, but tables are still supposed to be 1.5 metres apart (or with a physical…

Paul Christensen posted a comment and directed my attention to something he had written in the SCMP The cold, hard maths of whether a coronavirus shutdown is worth everyone’s loss of quality of life Do the benefits of the Covid-19 economic shutdown justify the costs? This is a fundamental question that governments need to address,…

In the last three weeks the number of COVD-19 cases in Hong Kong has increased from around 270 to 1,001.  That sounds a bit scary, but other countries have seen much larger increases over the same period (25x in US, 15x in UK). The biggest factor by far has been the large number of people…