Hong Kong third wave: thousands of port employees to be tested as city confirms 62 new Covid-19 cases
- The testing comes after 14 workers at the massive Kwai Tsing Container Terminals were found to have contracted the coronavirus
- Wednesday’s tally is about double the number recorded a day earlier
All but one infection in the latest tally – which was nearly double the figure registered on Tuesday – were locally transmitted, including 33 that were linked to previous cases.
Three people linked to the Kwai Tsing Container Terminals who had preliminarily tested positive on Tuesday, as well as two more new cases linked to the port, were also among the confirmed infections. So far, 16 patients have been linked to the cluster, with 14 being workers there.
Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the communicable disease branch of the Centre for Health Protection, noted the port was a huge site, with thousands of workers operating across nine terminals on the 279-hectare site.
“We are arranging for all of the several thousand workers at the terminals to take a virus test. [Sampling] bottles will be given to them,” she said, adding that her team had asked the operators to carry out deep cleaning in places such as restrooms.
“The infected workers did not concentrate at a particular terminal. Some worked at Terminals 1 and 4. Some of them had meals in the same common room, and some used the same changing room. They were rather scattered.”