A government expert advisor on Saturday said now the coronavirus epidemic has “ended”, health authorities will discuss at the end of this month whether or not to make providing Covid jabs a regular practice.

Speaking on a radio programme, David Hui said he expects the arrangement will be similar to that of influenza jabs.

“I guess the elderly, those who have chronic illness, those who are immunocompromised would definitely need to have regular jabs. But for the frequency, we need to wait for the recommendation by the [World Health Organisation]. Probably, you know, maybe every twelve months or so,” he said.

The WHO vaccine group will hold a meeting on March 20 and 21. Hui expects the group to issue guidelines on whether or not Covid jabs should be administered on a regular basis, and the Centre for Health Protection will discuss the details afterwards.

Meanwhile, reflecting on the fifth wave of Covid in the first half of last year, Hui said home quarantine should have been implemented earlier.

“Vaccine hesitancy was a big problem. Many elderly were unvaccinated or fully vaccinated, so they develop very severe disease, and require hospitalisation,” he said.

“At that time, we were also implementing the containment policy. So those who have no symptoms or mild symptoms still needed to be isolated in a hospital setting. So that actually flooded the hospitals, overloaded the hospital system.”

“So had we actually introduced home isolation for the mild cases, or cases with no symptoms, and also close contacts, that certainly would have alleviated the pressure on the public system.”

He also noted that health authorities only reported a few Covid and flu cases after the dropping of the mask mandate, and recent flu cases were much fewer than recorded in previous peak flu seasons.