Combatting COVID-19: a round-up of how Hong Kong’s universities are making a difference (May-Jun)
11 June 2020
An overview of the latest scientific research on COVID-19 from Hong Kong universities from May to June 2020.
Round-up: Probing the societal consequences of COVID-19
10 June 2020
May 2020Impact of pandemic on elderly services Research by the Asia-Pacific Institute of Ageing Studies at Lingnan University has found that the COVID-19 outbreak has severely affected many services for the elderly in Hong Kong. In a survey, nearly 70 per cent of respondents working at the city’s service centres for seniors said that the “drop-in service” (69.8 per cent) and “social and...
Combatting COVID-19: a round-up of how Hong Kong’s universities are making a difference
18 April 2020
Research-based contributions to understanding and mitigation of different impacts of the pandemic locally and globally from across Hong Kong’s publicly funded universities
Psychological stress: coping with the pandemic and quarantine
17 April 2020
Top behavioural neuroscientist Professor Nick Rawlins has a warning for us all: spending hours and hours online to glean information about the coronavirus pandemic is potentially harmful to mental health.Rawlins, a Professor in the Psychology Department at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and Professor Emeritus of Behavioural Neuroscience at Oxford University, said earlier research into...
Infectious disease control: the battle to beat coronaviruses
16 April 2020
For Professor Joseph J Y Sung, it was very much a case of deja vu. After 17 years, a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-CoronaVirus (SARS-CoV) has returned as SARS-CoV-2, bringing back memories of when the Prince of Wales Hospital in Shatin was the epicentre of the first SARS outbreak that shut down Hong Kong for three months.In the spring of 2003, the atypical pneumonia spread from the first...
Clinical management: lessons from SARS
15 April 2020
Hong Kong government medical adviser and respiratory disease expert Dr David Shu Cheong Hui describes the city’s approach to clinical management of COVID-19 and how it has learnt from past experience with SARS
Search for a vaccine: SARS vs SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses
14 April 2020
As the outbreak of COVID-19, which is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, continues to spread globally, the race to produce an effective vaccine is underway.One of the many researchers making important contributions to the effort is Dr Nicholas Wu (Croucher Fellowship 2015) at The Scripps Research Institute in California, though he insisted the race was against the virus, not other scientists....
Identifying the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2: an interview with Leo Poon
13 April 2020
Professor Leo Poon Lit-man (Croucher Senior Research Fellowship 2017), the molecular virologist who discovered the first Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) viral sequence, was among the first to identify that the COVID-19 coronavirus is far more contagious from the moment of infection than SARS, potentially making it more difficult to eliminate in humans.He was also involved in the...
The virus hunters: leading the way in testing and diagnostics
12 April 2020
The importance of Hong Kong’s research into zoonotic infectious diseases and the potential of this work to contribute to the battle against SARS-CoV-2 is personified by Professor Malik Peiris (Croucher Senior Medical Research Fellowship 2005), Chair of Virology at the University of Hong Kong’s (HKU), School of Public Health.The on-going coronavirus outbreak is the fourth occasion that this...
The epidemiologists’ quest: tracking and halting transmission of COVID-19
11 April 2020
HKU epidemiologists discuss their leading research contributions to local, national, and global public health policy and the world’s “new normal” of pandemic containment and mitigation
Message from the Chairman
10 April 2020
COVID-19, the disease resulting from the novel SAR-CoV-2 coronavirus, is an unprecedented challenge in the modern world, for communities and their governments, public health, and science.Hong Kong has been at the forefront of this global race to control the pandemic, with its critical mass of scientists focused on emerging infectious diseases and lessons learned from the SARS outbreak that so...