Hong Kong\u2019s current flu season, driven by a highly transmissible mutated virus strain and compounded by a cold snap, will be significantly prolonged and may overlap with the coming winter season, a leading infectious disease expert has said.<\/p>\n
David Hui Shu-cheong, a professor of respiratory medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, also said on Sunday that the city would have to study whether the flu could become perennial \u2013 the situation in Singapore \u2013 requiring the acquisition of vaccines designed for both northern and southern hemispheres.<\/p>\n
Hui said the summer influenza peak occurred around mid-October and was now gradually receding. The process typically took six to eight weeks, but the current situation was complicated by the onset of cooler weather.<\/p>\n
He explained that colder temperatures naturally increased the activity of the virus, which would affect the city as the mercury was expected to dip to as low as 13 degrees Celsius (55.4 Fahrenheit) later this week due to a cold front moving across the coast of Guangdong.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen people are afraid of the cold and move indoors, where the air is not well circulated, it creates conditions that could prolong the period of transmission,\u201d Hui told a television programme, saying places such as homes for the elderly and schools could be affected.<\/p>\n
The dominant strain, a variant of H3N2, had also undergone an \u201cantigenic drift\u201d, involving seven mutations that primarily affected its transmissibility, Hui said, citing UK data estimating that the mutated strain could infect 140 people for every 100 cases, up from 120 previously.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis combination of factors may prevent the epidemic from receding within the usual six-to-eight-week time frame and extend the transmission period,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hong Kong\u2019s current flu season, driven by a highly transmissible mutated virus strain and compounded by a cold…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137620,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[13286,93854,17389,93852,10411,4422,52682,134,4431,93855,111,43,139,69,22069,9739,38045,1613,93853],"class_list":["post-137619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-chinese-university-of-hong-kong","tag-cold-front","tag-covid-19-pandemic","tag-david-hui-shu-cheong","tag-department-of-health","tag-guangdong","tag-h3n2","tag-health","tag-hong-kong","tag-hong-kong-childhood-immunisation-programme","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-scmp","tag-singapore","tag-tamiflu","tag-uk","tag-winter-flu-outbreak"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}