 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Recent times have presented some curious developments in the COVID-19 front. This involves the increase in cases in Hong Kong and New Zealand on the one hand, and a policy decision by the state of Florida in the US on the other. The rise of cases in Hong Kong and the stress on the health system surprised many, as the general perception was that the Omicron variants are relatively milder. What led to this stress on the health care system in Hong Kong? In the United States, meanwhile, the state of Florida is planning to advise against vaccinating healthy children for COVID-19. This is in defiance of the suggestions of the federal government and the Centers for Disease Control. What has led to this stance? Immunologist Dr Satyajit Rath explains. Hi, this week in COVID news across the world, there are a couple of interesting developments that all of us should take note of. Firstly, is the news that has been occupying the world, especially those who track COVID news over the past month, namely the enormous increase in COVID cases in Hong Kong and in New Zealand? And the question being asked is, particularly of Hong Kong, how is it that even though this outbreak is of the Omicron strain of the virus, everybody is saying that the Omicron strain causes mild illness? Why are Hong Kong's hospitals still overwhelmed? Why is Hong Kong reporting so many deaths? And I think the comparison between Hong Kong and New Zealand is useful to consider in keeping mind. Both have taken public health policy perspectives of so-called zero COVID. They have aggressively maintained containment, case identification, contact tracing, tracking, isolation, extremely careful management of travel, particularly international travel. And as a result, their record over the past two years compared to the rest of the world, Hong Kong in common with the rest of China, of course, has been of substantial success in keeping COVID-19 cases very, very, very low in numbers. What has changed? And how has it changed in somewhat different directions in Hong Kong and New Zealand? So the first thing that has changed is that as we've discussed in this forum over and over, the virus has evolved from strain to strain with better and better capacities for transmission. And that means that public health measures that limit transmission for one strain effectively may not quite achieve the same result for a more transmissible strain. And that is what has happened with the Omicron group of virus strains. The Omicron group of virus strains has been spreading extraordinarily rapidly regardless of public health measures across the world. And that is true in Hong Kong and New Zealand as well. It's instructive that their fairly rigorous measures of containment have not managed to keep the Omicron strain with that high level of transmissibility out there. That's one. A second point to keep in mind is that we have all been saying that vaccination is useful even against the Omicron strain of the virus. In which case, why are there growing numbers of cases? And the response to that is, the explanation for that is that vaccines from the 2020 strain of the virus, which is what all the current vaccines are, are useful in the Omicron lineage infections in controlling the likelihood of severe illness, hospitalization and death, not of actual infection. And therefore, mild to moderate infection with the Omicron strain spreads in Hong Kong, in New Zealand, in India, in Africa, in Latin America and in the global north, extremely rapidly, even in vaccinated communities. The difference is that in vaccinated communities, the Omicron infection does take place, but severe illness does not result. That brings us to the next point. What is the difference because of which Hong Kong has begun to see an extremely high rate of hospitalizations and a growing number of deaths? And the response seems to be that even though Hong Kong has vaccinated 73, 74 percent of adults with vaccines, there is a disproportionately lower rate of vaccination in Hong Kong in the elderly. And it appears from preliminary information that people landing up in hospitals with severe illness with Omicron in Hong Kong may well disproportionately be the small percentage of unvaccinated people. New Zealand perhaps is somewhat different in that respect. Ironically, the general anecdotal evidence seems to be that many people, particularly the elderly in Hong Kong, have avoided vaccination, not because of anti-science, right wing, anti-vaxxer irrationalities, but simply out of a practical, pragmatic calculation that there is no infection, there is no disease, we haven't had anything for two years. Why bother to get vaccinated? And that pragmatic decision seems to be now costing the community somewhat dearly. And that implies that the sheer success in controlling and containing infection is itself contributing to a certain amount of perhaps one could say anxious complacency in the community. So that's one issue that is recent. The other issue that is connected to the right wing anti-science irrationalities in the global North is exemplified by the other piece of news which comes out of the United States of America, that the state of Florida is going to formally advise its residents not to vaccinate children with the COVID vaccines that have been by the U.S. regulatory agencies approved for use in children. So why is the state of Florida going against the federal governments and the Centers for Disease Controls advice and recommendations as well as against the U.S. FDA's recommendations? The answer seems to be the anti-vaxxer scaremongering irrational ideologies of the regressive right wing politics that seems to be quite prominent in some of these decision-making processes. The argument has been made that children don't get severe COVID and that vaccines have side effects and that therefore giving children vaccines risks more by way of severe side effects than it does of severe illness in COVID. In the first place, the numbers don't bear this relative comparison out. The arguments made about serious vaccine side effects are inflated, the arguments underplaying the serious infection consequences in children are overblown. The point to keep in mind is that this is second guessing, third guessing, fourth guessing, formal well-considered expert advice and U.S. federal government strategy all in the pursuit of a regressive right wing politics that refuses to be evidence-based and is instead based on prejudice. From both of these examples, there are lessons to be learned for all of us in the global public health community.