Opinion

Covid-19 persists amid puzzling hepatitis cases and monkeypox outbreaks – welcome to the new abnormal

Compared with countries like the UK that are living with the virus and the mainland’s citywide lockdowns, Hong Kong’s measures have been more balanced, albeit with some oddities

A sensible approach would be to now focus on a few science-driven initiatives, like improving air quality

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Martin Williams is a Hong Kong-based writer specialising in conservation and the environment, with a PhD in physical chemistry from Cambridge University.

Published: 9:45am, 4 Jun 2022Updated: 3:37am, 15 Jun 2022

On February 1, 2020, as the coronavirus yet to be named Covid-19 was starting to spread, Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California who studies infectious diseases, tweeted, “Duck tape your underpants. 2020 is going to be a wild ride”.

And what a wild ride it was, with the outbreak rapidly becoming a pandemic and – according to the worldometer website – causing 1,954,817 deaths by December 31, 2020. Not that the wild ride ceased at the end of 2020: Covid-19 is still here, with the official death toll now at over 6.3 million, and still rising.

Even this figure probably belies the true toll: a study published in The Lancet estimated that from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021, 18.2 million people had died worldwide because of the pandemic.

Scientifically, we’ve learned a lot about Covid-19 and ways to combat it, even developing vaccines that greatly reduce the risk of death. Yet the virus remains an issue, no matter how much we might wish it gone.