Hong Kong to step up Covid-19 surveillance and may make all air travellers remain in specific locations until coronavirus test results known
- From Monday, travellers arriving at the airport will have to submit another deep-throat saliva sample before they complete their 14-day quarantine
- One of two new cases involves a four-year-old girl who recently returned from Britain with her mother, earlier confirmed with the infection
Hong Kong health authorities will step up Covid-19 surveillance and are considering making all air travellers remain in specific locations until their coronavirus test results are known, despite the city recording just two new cases on Saturday, a single-digit increase for the seventh day in a row.
With the city’s total infection tally at 1,023, health officials are now planning from Monday to give an extra specimen bottle to air travellers to submit another deep-throat saliva sample before they complete their 14-day quarantine, if they do not develop symptoms during the period.
“We hope to collect some information and see whether the positive rate is high, and who is at higher risk,” said Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the communicable disease branch of the Centre for Health Protection.
Those who collected an extra bottle would need to take another sample by themselves on a designated date before their quarantine period ended.
They would have to hand in their specimens, either through family or friends, or by a door-to-door service, to a collection point on the same morning.
Chuang said six patients who were confirmed with the virus after they completed their quarantine period had not collected a sample bottle for a virus test on arrival because there was no such requirement at the time, meaning they had not been tested previously.
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She urged those under home quarantine to seek medical help as soon as possible if they felt unwell.
Currently, all arrivals are required to leave saliva samples on entering the city. But only those arriving from Britain, the United States and Europe have to wait at the temporary testing centre at AsiaWorld-Expo until the results are out. From Sunday, the arrangement would be extended to all air travellers who arrived in the morning.
With public health experts calling for all arrivals to be released only after test results were known, Chuang said the authorities were “actively exploring other options” to see whether they could keep all travellers waiting.
She said such a move was not possible at the moment because of time and space constraints.
“If we hold travellers in the morning, we have time to process the tests and give back the results in the evening. But [if they come] in the afternoon, they have to stay overnight, so it’s very difficult to arrange,” she said.
Both the two new infections reported on Saturday had a history of recent travel. One was a four-year-old child who returned from Britain with her mother, who was previously a confirmed case.
The other case was a 29-year-old man who studies in Manila and returned to Hong Kong on Friday. Three relatives and friends of the man have been classified as close contacts as they had been with him at the same flat in Tung Chung.
Meanwhile, the temporary test centre run by the Hospital Authority at AsiaWorld-Expo, targeting those with symptoms, will be suspended from Sunday noon. A similar facility operated by the authority at North Lantau Hospital had already stopped operating on April 5.
A centre operated by the Department of Health at the same site, for those who did not show any symptoms, would continue to operate.
Under the latest arrangements, those with symptoms would be transferred to various accident and emergency (A&E) departments in hospitals.
Linda Yu Wai-ling, the authority’s chief manager, said in recent days, 20 to 30 people used the centre, although sometimes it could be fewer than 10.
“There are fewer arrivals, and our triage and testing services at A&E departments are more mature,” she said, adding that the authority needed to consolidate its manpower for its hospital services.
But she said if the development of the pandemic changed later, they would consider reopening the centre.
In the past month, the authority’s two testing centres at Asia World-Expo and the North Lantau Hospital collected more than 1,400 samples and identified 104 confirmed cases.
Yu said the on-the-spot testing and release of results had prevented 1,300 admissions to public hospitals, leaving more isolation facilities for confirmed cases.
On Saturday, 35 more coronavirus patients were discharged, bringing the total number of recovered confirmed cases to 567.
