HONG KONG (Reuters) – Scores of mainland Chinese travellers are rushing to Hong Kong to receive mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which usually are not available on the Chinese mainland, because the country grapples with a torrent of infections which have overwhelmed its health system.
A non-public hospital within the special Chinese administrative region of Hong Kong welcomed the primary batch of mainland customers on Thursday, just five days after China reopened its borders for the primary time in three years, allowing quarantine free travel.
Yoyo Liang, a 36-year old Beijing resident, was one in every of the primary customers on the Virtus Medical Centre where she paid HK$ 1,888 ($241) for her first BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
Liang had received three domestically developed vaccine doses from China’s Sinovac over the past two years but said she took Pfizer-BioNtech’s bivalent booster vaccine to higher protect herself against the virus.
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“I used to be very tempted to get the vaccine due to border reopening. There isn’t any bivalent vaccine available in mainland Chin,” she explained after she received her jab.
Virtus, which has received greater than 300 inquiries to this point in regards to the vaccines, is expecting more mainland customers to come back to Hong Kong in the approaching weeks and months, the corporate’s chief medical officer Samuel Kwok told reporters.
Nevertheless, as a result of a lot of people already infected, many would wait before taking a booster shot, he said.
“Demand is increasing but we understand that there are a whole lot of individuals who got infected recently… they can’t get… a booster dose immediately in order that they need to wait for a minimum of three months.”
China, home to 1.4 billion people, abruptly abandoned its zero-COVID policy last month and infections are surging across a population with little immunity after being shielded for the reason that virus emerged three years ago within the Chinese city of Wuhan.
(Writing by Farah Master; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
Copyright 2023 Thomson Reuters.
