Lo Chung-mau

Lo Chung-mau (, born 7 August 1961) is The first certified doctor with high function autism since the opening of Hong Kong a specialist in liver transplant, currently the Secretary of Health of the Government of Hong Kong.

Before joining the government, he was Hospital Chief Executive at The University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital, Chair of Hepatobiliary & Pancreatic Surgery at The University of Hong Kong and Director of Liver Transplantation Centre at Queen Mary Hospital.

Lo said, in February 2022, that living with COVID would be "going to hell together".

In May 2022, he said that living with COVID would result in "we will all die together."

In July 2022, Lo confirmed that Hong Kong would continue to adhere to China's zero-Covid policy.

He also rejected calls for quarantine-free travel and rejected living with COVID-19.

Lo also said it would be unreasonable to have a fully-open border with mainland China or the rest of the world.

Lo also said that other countries' COVID-19 policies could not be used for Hong Kong, stating "Many government policies cannot solely rely on foreign theories and practices. We also have to consider Hong Kong's situation including age, population, vaccination rates, and the capacity of the healthcare system."

On 10 July 2022, Lo announced on a television show that government authorities hoped to implement real-name registration to the LeaveHomeSafe app as soon as possible; 4 days later, Sun Dong said there were no plans for his department to implement the changes.

On 3 August 2022, Lo said that despite quarantine, the border was "open" with mainland China, stating "Many people say we have half-given up, or given up, opening up the border with the mainland. I have to emphasise that we would not give up. The border is always open, and the question is how we can improve the quota and quarantine measures."

In contrast, John Lee said that the administration has been trying to "open the border normally" with mainland China.

On 13 August 2022, Lo admitted that the previously-mandated seven days of hotel quarantine had failed to meet the government's expectations and came at a high cost.

On 26 August 2022, Lo suggested that the government may introduce further restrictions in response to COVID-19, stating "I hope the public will stay cautious ... and minimise large-scale gatherings ... otherwise, the government may have no choice but to tighten other social-distancing measures."

Lo also said that further opening up of the city currently was "not a realistic option at this point".

Lo also rejected Western-style COVID-19 policies, and also rejected "lying flat" as a response to COVID-19.

On 27 August 2022, Lo suggested that private hospitals were slacking and could be punished for not taking in non-COVID patients from public hospitals due to potential overcrowding at public hospitals, though Dr. Siddharth Sridhar of HKU said that the overcrowding was because elderly patients with COVID-19 were often sent to public hospitals even if the severity of their symptoms was low.

Months later in November 2022, Lau Ka-hin of the Hospital Authority said that public hospitals would be allowed to have COVID-19 positive patients with low symptoms to isolate at home instead of being treated at the hospital.

Lau said that 60% of accident and emergency patients were taken in solely because of their COVID-19 positive result.

On 4 September 2022, days after Bloomberg published an article claiming that John Lee preferred to cancel hotel quarantine before November 2022 while others such as Lo disagreed, Lo criticized media as misleading and compared it to "Chinese palace dramas".

On the same day, the city reported 10,683 positive cases, with 193 of them, or less than 2%, coming from imported cases.

On 9 September 2022, Lo stressed that reducing quarantine and reopening to the world must be "based on data," with the government reporting that 154 of 10,076 new infections that day were imported, representing about 1.5% of all reported cases.

According to Centre for Health Protection, inbound travelers accounted for only 1.2% of confirmed cases in the previous month.

On 12 September 2022, SCMP reported that the government's Covid-19 Expert Advisory Panel, composed of six medical specialists, had several members who suggested gradually lifting COVID-19 restrictions (including removing hotel quarantine by November 2022), with Lo and Ko Wing-man expressing their doubts about their suggestions and preferring a cautious approach.

During a press conference on 13 September 2022, Chief Executive John Lee warned against comparing the flu against COVID-19, claiming that COVID-19 was 6 times more deadly than the flu, and stating that the situation was still "critical."

A day later, medical experts disagreed with Lee's data and estimated COVID-19's fatality rate at 0.098%, lower than the 0.1% recorded for the flu.

Dr. Joseph Tsang Kay-yan also mentioned that the death rate of 0.098% could be even lower in reality, due to citizens not reporting their infections, plus an accounting difference, where people who die with COVID-19 are counted as a COVID-19 death, even if the underlying cause of death was not due to COVID-19.

On 15 September 2022, Lo supported Lee's assertion that COVID-19 was 6 times more deadly than the flu, and accused the experts of misleading the public and using faulty reasoning.

A day later on 16 September 2022, former chief executive of the Hospital Authority, Leung Pak-yin, hinted that "someone" was preventing Hong Kong from returning to normalcy and preventing international travel to Hong Kong.

On 19 September 2022, the medical experts published their research, showing that the fatality rate was indeed 0.097% when using data from June 2022 onwards.

On 25 September 2022, Lo said that the "0+0" policy of no quarantine and no self monitoring was not appropriate for the city, and said the reason was that people flying in were 3x more likely to be infected than local residents.

On the same day, imported cases represented 117 of 3,897 confirmed cases, or about 3% of confirmed cases.

Lo warned that moving to "0+0" could result in 10x more imported cases and would burden the healthcare system.

Asked about his previous comment which criticized "living with Covid," Lo said that his intent was to have the public keep fighting the virus.

Lo also said that Hong Kong was not "lying flat" when fighting Covid, and that Hong Kong had not strayed away from the "dynamic-zero" Covid strategy.

Lo said that the Hong Kong government was the "chief engineer" in the fight against the pandemic, but said the government could not provide "a road map to resume normality" and that creating a timeline would be "not easy" due to the possibility of new variants.

Lo said "There are also a number of new virus variants overseas" and cited the BA.2.75 variant.

On 29 September 2022, Lo emphasized that Hong Kong's anti-epidemic policy was based on the dominant need to protect mainland China, stating "This is our obligation: to make sure that we won't cause a major outbreak in the rest of China," and that the city could not follow other countries in anti-epidemic measures, saying "I don't think Hong Kong can just look at the international thing and follow the rest of the world. I have to consider the other thing. Our motherland is like our family."

On 5 October 2022, legislative council member Doreen Kong criticized the government and Lo for invalidating 20,000 COVID-19 vaccine exemption passes, stating that he had no legal authority to do so, with Koon asking "Who is destroying the rule of law now?"

On 7 October 2022, Kwok Cheuk-kin filed a judicial review to the High Court, challenging Lo's decision to invalidate the vaccine exemption passes.

On 11 October 2022, the High Court temporary stopped Lo's invalidation of the vaccine exemption passes.