With thousands of people locked down in tiny apartments, government quarantine centres filling up and many businesses shuttered, Hong Kong is scrambling to sustain a zero-COVID policy that has turned one of the world's most densely packed cities into one of the most isolated.
The economic and psychological tolls from the global financial hub's hardline approach - in line with China's strategy - are rapidly rising, residents say, with measures becoming more draconian than those first implemented in 2020.
Besides schools, authorities in the city of 7.5 million have shut down playgrounds, gyms and most other venues, while tens of thousands of people are required to do daily coronavirus tests.Over 2,000 hamsters and other animals have been culled to stop transmissions as community cases surge.Siddharth Sridhar, clinical assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Microbiology, said "a very practical adjustment in terms of our containment strategy" was needed.
While Hong Kong succeeded in keeping the virus under control for much of 2021, there have been over 600 locally transmitted infections in January so far, compared with just two in December, as the highly transmissible Omicron variant spread. "Only Hong Kong and China are saying they are trying to eradicate the virus," he said. "It would have worked if other countries did the same but the fact they don’t think that way means the virus is always flowing."
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