Michael Tien: antibody tests can help reopen border

Roundtable lawmaker Michael Tien has called on the government to step up testing at the border – including checking travellers for Covid-19 antibodies – to encourage Shenzhen authorities to drop travel restrictions.

Speaking on RTHK’s Backchat programme, Tien said tighter measures for people arriving in the SAR from elsewhere in the world could reassure mainland officials that border crossings would not increase the risk of a fresh coronavirus outbreak there.

“There is a process by which it will make the mainland feel very comfortable that leaked cases will be kept to zero,” Tien said on Monday.

“So testing during quarantine, plus antibody testing, is a stronger guarantee for having no cases leaked into the community. And if all the cases are found during the quarantine period it’s OK with Shenzhen.”

Tien said Shenzhen was aiming for a 70 percent vaccination rate by July, further increasing the likelihood that Hong Kong visitors who were vaccinated would be allowed in without quarantine.

However, speaking on the same programme, Dr Alvin Chan from the Medical Association questioned whether the mainland would be able to achieve such a high vaccination rate without inoculating children and more elderly people.

He also said mutant strains of the virus could pose additional problems.

“We don’t know the efficacy of each of these vaccines against the new, mutant virus,” he said. “I think that is why the mainland is very stringent in controlling the entry points, the ports.

“That’s why they don’t open the border between Hong Kong and mainland China so easily. We have to bear in mind about the mutant strains and also the vaccines they are using, and also the age range they are vaccinating.”

The mainland initially began offering inoculations to key workers and only began adding elderly people on good health to its vaccination programme in late March.

Most border crossings have been closed and quarantine restrictions have been in place since the early days of the coronavirus crisis last year.

A period of relatively few Covid infections in the SAR has raised hopes of a travel bubble with neighbouring Guangdong province. The SAR reported two new infections on Sunday, one of which had no clear source.