Recap of Keynote Session III: Control, Policy and Long COVID

Speaking on the topic “Control, Policy and Long COVID”, Professor Wu Hao, Director, Fangzhuang Community Health Center of Fengtai District, Beijing and one of China’s “National Outstanding Individual Awardees in the National Fights against COVID-19 Pandemic referred to the mainland China’s 4 measures to precisely control the pandemic. They are pandemic information spatialization, data retrieval visualization, people management delicacy, and community service optimization. The infected persons and their related information such as the residence of close contacts are put on a map for easy identification. All information related to the infected and their close contacts are reviewed to see if they have any association. When it comes to people management, complete lockdown and quarantine will cover all related parties. The fourth measure refers to communicating the pandemic information to the general public in a transparent way.

Professor David SC HUI, Chairman, Department of Medicine and Therapeutics, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong shared his views on “Zero COVID vs Living with the virus. Pros and Cons”. He started with making comparison of the benefits and the drawbacks of 2 pandemic control policies and the context for their application. As the senior’s vaccination rate is still relatively low in Hong Kong and the Delta variant is more infectious, he recommended our city to continue with Zero Strategy. In the subsequent Q&A session, he commented though Hong Kong people have adopted good personal hygiene practices, vaccination rate should be boosted up and the source of infections which in the local case are imported should be stopped as far as possible, to contain the virus spread, with the understanding that effective and upgraded vaccines will take years to develop.