Instead, the city should focus on getting as many people, especially elderly citizens, to receive the jabs as early as possible.

“Countries like the United Kingdom and the United States have a vaccination rate of over 70 percent, of which a significant number are elderly citizens. Even though they still have a large number of daily cases, the death rate is not high,” the top microbiologist from the University of Hong Kong said.

“If Hong Kong achieves a vaccination rate of 90% but only a small minority of elderly citizens are vaccinated, there would be an unfavourable result as the 10% of unvaccinated individuals might infect the elderly with the disease.”

On the recently-tightened border restrictions, Yuen stated that available data on the highly contagious Delta Covid-19 variant showed previous quarantine arrangements were too loose and longer quarantine period will allow prompt detection of infected arrivals.