Hong Kong will ease some social distancing measures later this month, allowing people to dine in at restaurants in the evening and lifting restrictions on private gatherings, as the number of COVID-19 infections declined in recent weeks.
From April 21, restaurants will be able to operate until 10 p.m. with a maximum of four people per table, officials said Thursday.
Other businesses that were ordered to temporarily close due to Hong Kong’s fifth wave of infections, such as beauty parlors, gyms, theme parks and cinemas, will also be allowed to re-open, although capacity will be limited to 50%. Bars and pubs will remain closed.
Restrictions that currently only allow two households to gather will also be lifted.
“To relax these measures, to allow some degree of normal activities in society, with more interactions among citizens, inevitably they will come with some transmission risks,” Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said during a news conference Thursday.
Lam appealed to the public to comply with the social distancing measures that remain in place and to get vaccinated.
“While the number of positive cases reported every day has dropped to a relatively low level, in absolute terms they are still rather high,” she said.
The city reported 1,260 cases in the community on Wednesday, down more than 95% from the peak of the outbreak in March, when over 30,000 daily infections were reported.
Lam said the city is now “much, much better prepared” to handle another wave if it hits, due to increased levels of vaccination and more facilities to handle patients, such as community isolation and treatment centers.
Lam also said the government has not given up on mass testing for the city, but that timing was important.
Other restrictions will be also lifted later this month. Local tours will be allowed to resume and public gatherings of four people instead of two will also be permitted.
Total Doses Distributed = 713,605,745. Total Doses Administered = 567,188,881. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 256,489,187. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 218,622,907.
A major effort to overhaul care for people in the United States with mental health and drug problems is gaining traction as Congress and the Biden administration work on overlapping plans to address concerns across dividing lines of politics, geography and race.
Top goals include responding to the mental health crisis among youth, increasing the supply of professional counselors and clinicians, narrowing a persistent gap between care for physical and mental health problems, and preserving access to telehealth services that proved their usefulness in the pandemic.
COVID-19 has laid bare the need.
The U.S. was already in a mental health crisis, with suicide rates climbing and chronic problems accessing treatment. The opioid epidemic had a firm grip on cities and small towns. But the coronavirus made everything worse.
Trying to translate need into action, the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee are working to produce bipartisan legislation this summer.
Leaders of the Finance Committee have enlisted pairs of senators — one Democrat, one Republican — to develop policy ideas in five broad areas. The committee has jurisdiction over major government health insurance programs while the other committee oversees private insurance and public health.
“I think everybody understands the challenge of threading the needle in a 50-50 Senate,” said the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. But, he added, “the most important takeaway for me is that the urgency is different … more people are falling between the cracks.”
“There is a very nonpartisan aspect to this — I wouldn’t even say it’s bipartisan,” said policy expert Hannah Wesolowski of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “The need for a rapid scale-up of mental health services is one of the few issues where the parties can come together.”
While lawmakers acknowledge the need for government action, details remain contentious. Democrats want bold strokes. Republicans are wary of new federal mandates and looking to restrain costs.
“This committee has a strong track record of generating consensus-based bills,” Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, the top Republican on Senate Finance Committee, said earlier this year. “I truly believe we can replicate that success here.”
A key player is noncommittal.
The office of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky had no comment on efforts in that committee. If McConnell were to oppose legislation, that would greatly complicate the prospects.
The Finance Committee is considering increased spending on in-school mental health services, broader use of telehealth for youth and more financial support to train youth mental health workers. Young people in rural areas and minority communities have more difficulty getting services. Biden’s plan calls for more money for school-based services, along with new social media safeguards for kids — also an issue of interest on Capitol Hill.
An overarching focus both for the White House and lawmakers is the widely recognized shortage of mental health professionals. Plans would invest billions in building up the workforce by supporting training and education, but that could take years. There’s discussion about immediately increasing the supply of counselors by allowing a wider range of professionals, including family and marriage therapists, to bill government health programs.
There’s also support for Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, a relatively new care model that offers services 24/7 to people dealing with drug and mental health crises. Centers rely on peer counselors, often in recovery from their own addictions.
A glaring inconsistency lawmakers want to address is the coverage gap between mental health and physical conditions. Parity is required by U.S. laws, but the reality can be far different. Some insurers honor parity on paper only, maintaining “ghost networks” of mental health providers who are not taking new patients — a dead end. Even Medicare falls short on parity. The program has a 190-day limit on inpatient psychiatric care.
Many Democrats would like to spell out mental health coverage requirements for private health insurance. But Republicans do not support new mandates. A compromise could involve civil fines on insurers that ignore legal obligations to cover mental health care.
One area where there does not seem to be much disagreement is telehealth, which was expanded in the pandemic. Video counseling and even voice-only sessions are becoming standard tools for mental health and drug treatment counseling. Making that coverage permanent would involve a cost. But lawmakers, particularly in rural areas, like the flexibility.
While there is clear momentum, that does not guarantee results in Congress. “I don’t know how it’s going to end up,” said Reyna Taylor, policy and advocacy chief for the National Council for Mental Wellbeing. “What I am happy to see is all the communication that is going on between the committees of jurisdiction.”
The Biden administration will extend for two weeks the nationwide mask requirement for public transit as it monitors an uptick in COVID-19 cases, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was set to extend the order, which was to expire on April 18, by two weeks to monitor for any observable increase in severe virus outcomes as cases rise in parts of the country. The move was being made out of abundance of caution, the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preview the CDC’s action.
The administration had been hoping to roll out a more flexible masking strategy this week that would have replaced the nationwide requirement.
The number of new coronavirus cases and deaths reported to the World Health Organization fell for a third consecutive week, a trend likely helped by the dismantling of testing and surveillance programs.
In its latest weekly report on the pandemic, issued late Tuesday, the U.N. health agency said the more than 7 million new cases reported represented a 24% decline from a week earlier. The weekly worldwide number of COVID-19 deaths, was down 18%, at over 22,000.
WHO said the decreases “should be interpreted with caution” as numerous countries where the virus is starting to subside have changed their testing strategies, meaning far fewer cases are being identified.
New cases and deaths are falling in every region of the world, including the Western Pacific, where a surge of infections has triggered severe lockdown measures in China.
WHO said it was monitoring several mutants of the virus descended from the omicron variant, including some recombined forms of existing omicron subvariants.
In a separate statement, the health organization said scientists in Botswana and South Africa have detected new forms of the omicron variant, labeled as BA.4 and BA.5, but aren’t sure yet if they might be more transmissible or dangerous.
To date, the new versions of omicron have been detected in four people in Botswana and 23 people in South Africa. Beyond Africa, scientists have confirmed cases in Belgium, Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom.
WHO said there was so far no evidence the new sub-variants spread any differently than the original omicron variant.
“There is no cause for alarm with the emergence of the new sub-variants,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s Africa director, said in a statement. “We are not yet observing a major spike in cases, hospitalizations or deaths.”
The agency called on all countries to sequence at least 5% of their COVID-19 samples; many countries, including Britain, Sweden and the United States, recently scrapped their widespread testing programs as the number of severe cases dramatically declined.
Still, the U.S. will soon mark 1 million COVID-19 deaths, and the virus is continuing to cause concern in China.
Officials warn Shanghai still doesn’t have its latest surge in omicron-involved cases under control despite a “zero-tolerance” approach that has seen some residents confined to their homes for three weeks or longer.
The lockdown has led to frustration among Shanghai residents about running out of food and unable to get deliveries. Censors have diligently scrubbed complaints from social media.
State-controlled outlets describe a successful campaign to provide food and other supplies and counseled residents that “persistence is victory.”
Total Doses Distributed = 712,646,145. Total Doses Administered = 566,532,062. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 256,363,358. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 218,521,227.
