The Hong Kong government yesterday invoked emergency powers to allow doctors and nurses from mainland China to work in the territory to help combat an escalating COVID-19 outbreak.
The densely populated territory is in the throes of its worst-ever wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, registering thousands of cases every day, overwhelming hospitals and government efforts to isolate all infected people in dedicated units.
Hong Kong authorities have followed a “zero COVID-19” strategy similar to mainland China, which kept infections mostly at bay throughout the pandemic.
However, they were caught flat-footed when the highly infectious Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 broke through those defenses,
May 19, 2021
published at 1:45 AMReuters
Medical staff transfer a patient suspected as a Covid-19 case at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong.
Reuters
Hong Kong’s plans to let non-locally trained doctors practise in the city to tackle a shortfall of medical staff in the public sector moved forward on Tuesday (May 18), with the bill to be read in the legislature on June 2.
Health Secretary Sophia Chan said Hong Kong faces a serious shortage of doctors compared with international standards, and the crunch was expected to severely deteriorate in the medium term. The per capita doctor ratio is two doctors per 1,000 people, compared with other economies.we are lagging far behind, Chan told a news conference.