TOKYO -- Hong Kong tumbled 87 places to 109th in the latest edition of Nikkei's COVID-19 recovery ranking, after the city's "zero-COVID" approach failed to stop the highly transmissible omicron variant.
The latest wave of the pandemic, which took off in Hong Kong in late December, caught the financial center off guard. Once widely viewed as a containment success story, with fewer than 13,000 cases and 213 deaths through the end of 2021, the city has seen those numbers rocket to 350,000 and 1,366 in the past two months, respectively.
