Infections have surged in the city, and its labs have been going at full speed. But wariness of the Chinese Communist Party runs deep.
The offer was presented as a favor to Hong Kong, a city struggling with a surge in coronavirus infections: a team of 60 medical officials from mainland China who would help expand testing across the city. But it is being viewed with skepticism by some residents, who worry about the growing reach of the Chinese Communist Party and the testing project’s potential implications for their privacy. Hong Kong could use the help. The largest wave of coronavirus infections to hit the semiautonomous city has overwhelmed its isolation wards and testing facilities in recent weeks. To reopen schools and lift restrictions on public gatherings and businesses, the local government needs an effective system of coronavirus testing that can help contain the outbreak. The problem is, the city is short of workers who can conduct testing, and the government’s labs are already running at maximum capacity. By mid-July, labs were operating around the clock, processing 10,000 tests a day, a rate that is unsustainable, according to Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s top leader. The government has had to limit access to testing in recent days, saying that it would allocate tests only to people with symptoms, or who had been in close contact with confirmed cases. The ability to provide testing for all who need or want it is a challenge for many cities and countries. That is where China comes in. “If you want to have a quantum jump in terms of the number of tests done per day, then we definitely need some help from other countries, or the mainland government,” said Leo Poon, head of the division of public health laboratory sciences at the University of Hong Kong. When it comes to conducting widespread testing, China is in a league of its own. The Chinese government takes pride in its ability to marshal the resources needed for mass testing, citing it as an advantage of the Communist Party’s system of centralized control. When officials in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus emerged, were confronted with a new outbreak in May, they tested 11 million people in roughly two weeks. In Beijing, the government mobilized close to 100,000 community workers in June to test roughly 2.3 million residents in about a week, as it tried to stamp out a new outbreak of its own. In June, Guo Yanhong, a senior official with China’s National Health Commission, said that China had been able to triple its nationwide testing capacity to 3.8 million tests a day from three months earlier, according to a government statement. Based on this rate, testing 7.5 million, the entire population of Hong Kong, “should not be a problem,” the local pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po reported. Beijing dispatched seven medical experts to Hong Kong on Sunday to help with testing, Chinese state media reported.
