Ho said on Tuesday that although the coronavirus still exists, the days of Covid pandemic are gone and the SAR has entered the post-pandemic stage.

He pointed out that authorities are still worried about the transmissibility of the virus, as they propose treating Covid as an ordinary upper respiratory disease but has yet to align some of the curbs, like asking medics and students to take a Covid test every day and recommending infected elderly home workers not to go to work.

Ho noted that many regions in Europe lifted the mask mandate a year ago and questioned the government's failure to control the tempo of the return to normalcy from the stringent Covid rules which began recently, for non-medical reasons.

The label of ‘long-Covid’ is also unnecessary, Ho said, and stressed it is common for the human body to become weak after getting very sick once.

Citizens need not to be ‘superstitious’ and should rest assured when welcoming pre-Covid lives back as long as they complete vaccination, he added.

Summarizing the past three years, Ho said he would never forget seeing elderly people waiting in long lines outside hospitals’ Accident and Emergency Department for hours at the peak of the fifth wave.

Had the government “forced” people to get inoculated against Covid by imposing the Vaccine Pass scheme six months earlier, such tragic experiences could have been avoided, according to Ho.

Meanwhile, Ho was glad that he was not one of the government’s Covid advisors, who were subjected to confidential agreements and faced almost the same speech restrictions on Covid as did principal officials.