Hong Kong lacks the resources for a China-style pandemic response, the city’s leader says.

Hong Kong is struggling to get a deal with on its worst coronavirus outbreak for the reason that begin of the pandemic, warning that it doesn’t have the testing capability to hold out the strict technique handed down by Beijing.

In Shenzhen and Shanghai, in mainland China, officers imposed restrictions on hundreds of thousands of individuals inside days of native outbreaks as a way to check each single resident. However Hong Kong’s chief government, Carrie Lam, famous on Monday that her metropolis doesn’t have the identical capability.

“Hong Kong may be very totally different from many mainland cities and due to this fact we can’t have any comparability,” Mrs. Lam instructed reporters at a information convention.

The distinction quantities to assets and methods of governance, Mrs. Lam mentioned. Shenzhen and Shanghai can check hundreds of thousands of individuals a day; Hong Kong’s well being officers can solely check between 200,000 and 300,000 individuals a day.

Hong Kong, one of many final locations on this planet that’s nonetheless attempting to eliminate the virus as a substitute of residing with it, has reported greater than 700,000 circumstances and 4,066 deaths since late January.

It’s a technique that has been dictated by Beijing however one which seems more and more out of attain for Hong Kong, which continues to carry freedoms that don’t exist within the mainland.

Within the Chinese language cities of Wuhan and Xian, officers halted day by day life and confined residents to their houses for weeks till there have been no extra native circumstances. In Tianjin, they started testing each single resident after simply 20 circumstances of coronavirus had been reported.

Additional separating Hong Kong from the mainland’s method, Mrs. Lam mentioned she wouldn’t contemplate tightening social-distancing measures as a result of she needed to take into how residents felt about them.

“I’ve to think about whether or not the general public would settle for additional measures, so we’d not simply casually roll out additional distancing measures,” Mrs. Lam mentioned.

The outbreak and Mrs. Lam’s capability to get it underneath management has been seen as a check of her management, although not one decided by extraordinary Hong Kong individuals. The election of the town’s subsequent chief will happen on Could 8 and will likely be determined by an “election committee” of greater than 1,400 people who find themselves loyal to China’s Communist Social gathering.

Mrs. Lam has been underneath stress from the general public to decide to a timeline for mass testing since she first raised the likelihood in mid-February.

Fears of a Wuhan or Xian sort of lockdown have prompted residents to empty grocery store cabinets and hoard medication. It has additionally led to an exodus of the town’s expatriate neighborhood, lots of whom have grown uninterested in two years of strict pandemic measures and uncertainty about how and when the town’s restrictions will finish.

“If you’d like us to observe what Shenzhen is doing, that’s to introduce obligatory common testing inside three days, I’m afraid we’re not as much as it,” Mrs. Lam mentioned. “It is a actuality now we have to resist.”