The missteps are almost too numerous to recount, but the worst ones have to do with Hong Kong’s singular inability to vaccinate its population. The government’s efforts were from the start imbued with politics and marred by poor messaging. It initially rushed through approval of the China-made Sinovac vaccine, and city leaders made a show of being inoculated with it, despite a better option—BioNTech’s mRNA jab—being available. (The large majority of deaths have been among the unvaccinated, but officials refuse to disclose data on which vaccine was administered to those who died after being vaccinated.) Press releases highlighting, with little context, the vaccine’s adverse effects were amplified by the media, leading to intense skepticism. Distrust in the government, still lingering from its handling of prodemocracy protests in 2019, did not help the cause. And most troubling has been the poor vaccination rate among the city’s elderly population, a persistent problem. Today, just 55 percent of people older than 80 have received one vaccine shot, and 36 percent have received two.

Lam Ching-choi, a physician and a member of Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s cabinet, told me that the government’s early reliance on family doctors to advise patients on vaccination was a mistake: Many warned the elderly to be cautious about receiving the vaccine. Predictably, COVID has swept through residential care homes—more than 29,000 elderly care-home residents have been infected during the current wave. Lam also told me that the government should have offered at-home vaccination for residents with mobility issues, and said the authorities would soon begin implementing that program. Yet it will start only next week, more than two months into the surge and more than a year after the vaccine rollout initially began.