Wider testing now essential after Hong Kong’s latest coronavirus infections
- Hong Kong’s strategy in battling the disease may have won international praise, but first locally transmitted cases in 23 days show even more must be done
Emotions are bound to run high with the surfacing of Hong Kong’s first locally transmitted Covid-19 cases in 23 days. The 66-year-old woman and her granddaughter had not recently travelled outside the city, and there is a scramble to identify the source and track down and screen people they had been in contact with.
Some social-distancing restrictions were relaxed last Friday and will expire next week, so questions are now being raised whether they should be reviewed. Those are decisions authorities have to make after a thorough investigation and consideration of the facts, but the advice of disease experts that wider community testing is necessary needs attention.
Relatives of the pair who were in close contact have either been taken to hospital or quarantined. Testing of others who were in proximity is under way as is a search for those who could have been exposed to them.
As proof of the concern, tests of residents of the two buildings involved in the cases in Tsuen Wan will be carried out. An investigation will hopefully determine how human-to-human transmission of the disease occurred.
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The new cases have also prompted the government to step up testing. From Friday, airport workers – determined to be most at risk of coming into contact with imported cases – will be included, and plans have been announced to extend it to psychiatric patients and homes for the elderly and disabled.