Yuen, David Lung and Siddharth Sridhar made the appeal in an article they co-wrote and published in Ming Pao Daily on Thursday, in which they proposed a series of changes to anti-epidemic policies.
They said the SAR government failed to learn from overseas experience when other countries opened up, and a lack of preparation for an outbreak had led to over 4,000 deaths, mostly of the elderly.
They said medical teams should therefore be sent to visit elderly people at home, answer their questions about Covid-19 vaccines and inoculate them.
The experts said there’s no need to insist on sending Covid patients with mild symptoms to isolation facilities, and refraining from doing this would reduce inconvenience for infected people and cut administrative work for civil servants, allowing them to focus on those more in need of help.
The facilities should be set aside for the elderly, young children and the chronically ill, or those whose homes are unsuitable for isolation, they said.
The HKU experts said although it seems this wave of infections has peaked, the city may still see thousands of cases per day in the coming months.
The government must introduce “mitigating measures” before every eligible person is inoculated with two jabs of BioNTech or three Sinovac shots and Hong Kong has a sufficient amount of anti-viral drugs, they said.
These include allowing close contacts of patients to resume work as long as they test negative for Covid every morning and wear two masks or an N95 mask when they go out, the experts said, adding this is especially important for medical workers, carers, paramedics and others who provide emergency or logistical services.
Flight bans should be lifted, as the number of imported cases are like “a drop in the ocean” compared to local cases, the experts said, adding that fully vaccinated Hongkongers should be allowed to self-isolate at home to free up rooms at quarantine hotels.
When the vaccination rate exceeds 95 percent, hopefully by summertime, the government can relax social distancing measures, but at the same time the vaccine mandate should be expanded to cover more places, including public transport, they said.
“The objective of a vaccine pass is not to punish the unvaccinated, but to protect them from being infected and developing serious illnesses or dying from the disease,” they said, adding that the measure will greatly reduce the workload of those in the healthcare system.
The experts said as its medical capacity increases, Hong Kong hopefully will be ready to brave a sixth wave of outbreaks in the future, and gradually resume normal life the way Singapore has, and be rid of the inconvenience brought by all the anti-epidemic measures.
The experts also warned against carrying out universal testing without having the capacity to trace and isolate patients.
“If there’s a resurgence of cases or a new wave of outbreaks shortly after such a large-scale and expensive testing exercise is conducted, it would definitely leave the public very disappointed, as they are extremely fatigued after fighting hard against the epidemic in the past two years,” they said.
Chief Executive Carrie Lam addressed the experts call for a roadmap to returning to normal life at her Covid briefing on Thursday.
She shot down the suggestion by the three University of Hong Kong microbiologists that Hong Kong should relax social distancing measures by the summer – as long as the vaccination rate reaches 95 percent.
Lam said that while officials are trying to boost the vaccination rate, society may be unhappy if a goal is set that’s hard to attain.
