3 Questions for Sophia Chan, MPH ’07
Sophia Chan, MPH ’07, is Hong Kong’s Secretary for Food and Health. In this position, she works in the Chief Executive’s cabinet, overseeing departments related to food safety, public health, and environmental hygiene. She has been at the center of coronavirus response in Hong Kong since December of 2019.
Q1: How did the virus arrive in Hong Kong, and how did it spread?
If we look at the confirmed case numbers, over 60% of them are imported cases from the rest of the world, not from China. Initially, we had some imported cases from Wuhan, but that was a very small number. Later on in March, we had a large surge of imported cases coming back to Hong Kong from elsewhere in the world. We have now stabilized our situation and have sporadic imported cases every now and then. Because we have so many imported cases, our primary strategy is to prevent the imported cases from coming in, and our secondary strategy is to prevent the spread of the infection in the community. Through our positive cases, we were able to find some high-risk places. For example, there were clusters of infection from bars and also karaokes in March, leading us to close those businesses temporarily because we feel that the behavior that actually happen in those premises is high-risk.
Q2: As of late May, Hong Kong has had just over a thousand coronavirus cases and only four deaths. How have you been able to control the situation so successfully?
After SARS, we built our equivalent of the CDC. We call it CHP, our Center for Health Protection; they are responsible for all infectious disease response. We have also put in a lot of resources in infectious disease research because we know this is something that is very important in public health. When the coronavirus hit us, we were very quickly put into a very high level of vigilance. Even before we had any confirmed cases, we immediately went into the “serious” response level whereby the entire government is alerted. Once we had the first confirmed case, we raised the level to “emergency,” not waiting for the pandemic.
We have always been very vigilant at border control. We have to first minimize the mobility of people coming into Hong Kong to prevent the spread of the infection by the imported cases. At some points we’ve denied entry to people who had been to certain places experiencing a very severe epidemic.
Testing and contact tracing are also key measures. We have been expanding our surveillance in terms of testing, not only for cases coming back from other countries, but locally as well. For example, we have asked both the public hospital system, as well as the private GPs, to try to collect samples for high-risk occupational groups to detect the asymptomatic cases in a community.
Q3: What economic toll has the virus taken in Hong Kong?
Hong Kong has never had any city lockdown per se. We have been exercising social distancing and mask wearing, way back to very early on during the epidemic. In terms of social distancing measures, we started very early on, and people have been wearing masks and remaining very vigilant. Probably because they have gone through SARS, everybody is very vigilant about their personal hygiene, as well as environmental hygiene.
Of course, the economic situation is challenging because we know that with all these measures, there are business who are about to close down. Our unemployment rate has also increased. The government has put in place two rounds of anti-epidemic funds and related relief measures, representing about 10% of our GDP to tide people and businesses over in these difficult times.