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Following is the transcript (English portion) of the media session given by the Chief Executive, Mr Tung Chee Hwa, at the Central Government Offices New Annex Conference Hall today (April 21):
Chief Executive: SARS has brought us an enormous challenge, and successfully containing SARS is my responsibility, my most important responsibility, and the responsibility of every citizen of Hong Kong. To contain SARS, we are doing a number of things. We want to be sure that the number of the frontline medical workers, who get affected, should be brought down to a very very minimum in the shortest possible time. We are going to enhance the health check across the borders. And we are going to emphasize as we have been doing all along, the importance of personal hygiene and environmental hygiene. And fourthly, we are enforcing home isolation. And fifthly, we are doing contact tracing of those people who have come into contact with those who had been affected by this disease.
I want to specifically talk about the contact tracing as well as home isolation. I had a long talk with those Government departments which have been involved in these two areas of work. The work is being led by the Department of Health supported very much by the Police and other relevant departments. The work is both huge in volume, very intensive, professional and also supported by modern information technology. They have, in fact, done an enormous job.
This work is important because it would then be able to contain the spread of SARS. The two examples I like to give are that since the home quarantine scheme started, since we started the contact tracing in a very vigorous way there were 150 suspected SARS cases detected and we gave them early treatment. This is not only helping them recover, but also preventing them from spreading the disease further. The other thing that is very important for me to say is that the work of this group of people is very active, very professional and very proactive, if I may say so. Any buildings if there are two or more families affected by SARS, you will see the whole Government moving towards the building to ensure that the disease do not spread. I think we are making good progress. From time to time, we might get the head here and there. But on the whole, I think we are slowly, but surely getting the figures stabilised.
Thank you very much.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript)
End/Monday, April 21, 2003
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