Press Release - May 23, 2003

The Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (Canada) today (May 23) welcomed the decision taken by the World Health Organisation to remove its recommendation for postponing all but essential travel to Hong Kong as Hong Kong has successfully contained the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

The Director of HKETO, Mrs. Rosanna Ure, said that the WHO decision reflected a worldwide recognition of the concerted efforts by the government, the medical and healthcare workers and the people of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and the international scientific community’s support given in fighting SARS in Hong Kong.

“SARS is a new virus never known to humans before. As the disease was totally unknown at the initial outbreak, Hong Kong took the full blunt of the epidemic despite general preventive measures implemented,” Mrs. Ure said.

“With new knowledge and experience gained, Hong Kong has adopted a four-pronged strategy, centred on early detection, swift contact tracing, prompt isolation and quarantine, and effective containment.

“The strategy has yielded very encouraging results. In the last 20 days in a row, Hong Kong has been able to keep the number of new cases to single digits and what is more promising is that in the last eight consecutive days, the daily figure is below five.”

She noted that all new cases in the past 20 days were people who had aready been identified as SARS contacts under active surveillance by the Hong Kong health authorities and that there had been no recent internationally exported cases from Hong Kong. “Despite that, we have to redouble our effort with a view to achieving the target of completely eradicating the disease in Hong Kong” Mrs. Ure said.

The HKETO Director said that with this latest development, Canadians should have every confidence in Hong Kong as a safe city for travel and business.

“Hong Kong and Canada are both affected by SARS. Now that Hong Kong has joined Canada as areas which are considered safe for travellers, Canadian citizens can sit back, relax, and enjoy their trips to Hong Kong, either as tourists or business travellers without worry or fear.” she added.

For more information, please contact:
John Tam, Chief Information Officer of Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office at: (416) 924-5544 or email: [email protected] or Elison Chu, Senior Information Officer, [email protected].