Is Hong Kong capable of doing large-scale testing?

The Centre for Health Protection said on Tuesday (11th) that many cases are currently living or living in Tuen Mun, and it is suspected that there is a hidden transmission chain in the area. It appeals to all people living in Tuen Mun and working in Tuen Mun to be tested. A number of places have included mandatory testing announcements, and citizens who visited Tuen Mun Ai Ding Shopping Centre from December 27 last year to January 9 this year were required to undergo six tests.

A large number of residents in Tuen Mun responded to the government and went to the testing center to wait for testing. However, there were only two testing sites in the area at that time, resulting in long queues of citizens.

"Hong Kong 01" reporters visited the site and found that the mobile sampling station of Tuen Mun On Ting Yau Oi Community Center detected crowds across the entire estate, and some residents said that they had waited for six hours and still could not get in.

It is not only half to mend a dead sheep

After the long queues at the Tuen Mun Large Testing Center, the government launched a contingency plan, saying that it would add eight mobile sampling stations starting Wednesday (12th), bringing the total number of locations that can be tested to ten.

However, five of them will only operate until next Tuesday (18th), the effect of a remedy that lasts less than a week is doubtful, and the detection points are mainly concentrated in large housing estates, which are not suitable for citizens living in the suburbs of Tuen Mun. convenient.

When asked about the lack of testing capacity on Wednesday, Chief Executive Carrie Lam emphasized that time is urgent and that the authorities and contractors have made their best efforts, and Tuen Mun is only a special case, and I hope the public will cooperate, but did not mention how to deal with similar situations.

Although the government has experience in compulsory closure of areas for testing many times, once the scale of testing needs to be expanded to larger communities, it will be incapable of being able to.

The government needs to rethink and detect the causes of chaos

Compared with the multiple rounds of large-scale nucleic acid screening carried out in Xi'an last month, the related work has been completed in a generally orderly manner, so that most hidden cases and community infections can be detected in time and the spread of the epidemic has been avoided. The Hong Kong government should reflect on this. , why even the work of one district could not be done well, and what is the problem?

As far as testing in Tuen Mun is concerned, the government is obviously underprepared. Early on, it suspected that there were many hidden transmission chains in Tuen Mun, but it did not allocate resources to the Tuen Mun community as soon as possible, but realized it later.

After a long queue for a day, many residents of Tuen Mun still had to wait in line for testing until Wednesday morning.

The government has always focused on the direction of "needle in the valley", but has neglected how to perfect the epidemic prevention and anti-epidemic work in different areas.

The implementation and concept of epidemic prevention measures have not been able to cooperate smoothly, and there is room for improvement in epidemic prevention work.

Testing is also an important part of epidemic prevention and control

The model developed by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University predicts that Tsuen Wan, Shatin, Kowloon Bay and Yuen Long will become the next high-risk areas for transmission based on the places where Omicron cases live and visit, vaccination rates and population movement data in Hong Kong. .

The government must learn from this lesson and plan a response plan as soon as possible so that the budget can allocate and even increase the resources to prevent the epidemic before it occurs.

The epidemic has come to the fifth wave of anti-epidemic measures, not to stop at the past. Members of the parliament should start again from strict quarantine and cultivate political wisdom. Re-open community vaccination centers to meet the needs of citizens for vaccines.