Life in the time of COVID-19

COVID-19 was initially dismissed as just a bad case of flu; as will be vividly recalled, it rapidly exerted a stranglehold on the entire planet. Three experts pondered the lessons learned, as Hayley Wong reports.

If there is one thing that stands out after the utterly confounding years of existing with COVID-19, it should not be “thinking that we can stand on the seashore and turn back the tide”. So said Ben Cowling, one of the authors of How COVID-19 Took Over the World.

As Hong Kong dropped COVID-19 mandates and reopened borders, the Hong Kong University Press book’s editor, Christine Loh, and two of its authors – Cowling and Judith Mackay – spoke at an FCC lunch in April about the lessons from the sweeping pandemic.

“We’ve had COVID-19 circulating around the world now for more than three years, but I don’t think there’s any sign the virus is going to disappear from the world. It is going to continue,” said Cowling, who is also the chair professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong.

As the COVID-19 virus comes and goes in waves, Cowling believes it will take the same course as another common cold coronavirus that originated in a pandemic in the end of the 19th century and became a common cold virus with milder infections over the course of 10 to 20 years.

We got people from all over the world. Everything was open,” one guest recalled.

e public inquiry into the SARS epidemic also paved the way for the Hong Kong government to deal with COVID-19, for instance adopting a scienti c advisory mechanism to involve non-governmental experts to respond to public health incidents. So could we have done better?

Despite Hong Kong’s experience with SARS, it was the exception rather than the rule to contain an epidemic, said Judith Mackay, a senior policy advisor to the World Health Organization.

“With SARS, it wasn’t until you really got bad symptoms that you became infectious,” she said.

protect the vulnerable with a solid vaccination programme e biggest lesson we have learned for a foreseeable pandemic is not to try to keep the virus out – but to protect the vulnerable with a solid vaccination programme, he said. e unexpectedly long and di cult crisis of COVID-19, which created a much more profound and global e ect on individuals, healthcare systems, economies and governments, was therefore worth a comprehensive book to round up the lessons that had been learned, Loh stated. e book is not limited to essential issues like vaccines and the role of the World Health Organization, but also covers how COVID-19 impacted the global economy and supply chains. It also discusses and compares cases in mainland China, Hong Kong, Europe and the United States through the lenses of social contract, culture, governance and trust.

Many who attended the event recalled how quickly Hong Kong moved on from SARS, a viral respiratory disease that broke out in 2003, in a mere six months. “We partied.

But COVID-19 is more like the u, she said: “You’re very infectious the day before and the day after. at’s the peak of maximum e ectiveness.” And that is what made COVID-19 stand out.

Writing while the pandemic was unfolding, she worked with an “excellent group of authors”, completed the nal adaptation at the end of 2022, and published the book in February this year, she said.

“I think it’s fair to say that nobody got it completely right over three years. We had a variety of responses. And we see people who did well early who later got lost, and we see people who didn’t do very well earlier on who really didn’t manage to do well later on either,” said Loh.

“It had nothing to do with how rich the society was. It didn’t mean that just because you were a developed economy, you necessarily did better.”

Loh added that it was interesting to analyse the dynamic between the government and the people, and what constitutes “good governance”.

Issues like government communication and the elderly vaccination rate in Hong Kong were raised by the audience, and the speakers agreed that a public inquiry into the pandemic is likely to take place, with Mackay suggesting within the next two years, “so that we can look back slightly divorced from being in the middle of it as we still are, and learn greater lessons from that with the perspective of time”.

Mackay also believes the world as a whole should “try much harder in pandemic preparedness” in future and an international pandemic could formalise “what needs to be done and when”. n

How COVID-19 Took Over the World may be downloaded for free via hkupress.hku.hk/image/catalog/COVID_Loh_ release_chapters/Loh_bookmarked%20-%20lowr.pdf