500 families in Hong Kong housing block urged to test for Covid-19 after resident found to be among city’s three new cases
- Remaining two new infections imported from Germany and United States
- City to ease some social-distancing rules from Friday, with more people allowed to sit together in pubs and restaurants
The patient was linked to a previous case, extending an overall streak of traceable infections to four days. The other two cases were imported from Germany and the United States, pushing the official tally to 5,313 cases, with 105 related deaths.
There were less than 10 preliminary positive cases on Thursday.
The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) confirmed the latest local case involved a 50-year-old woman, who lived in block H at Lok Man Sun Chuen, a residential building under the Hong Kong Housing Society, in To Kwa Wan.
The patient is the colleague of a 42-year-old clerk who works in Siu Ying Commercial Building in Sheung Wan. The clerk had been confirmed as infected on Sunday, but from an unknown source.
Authorities have asked some 500 households in that block to give deep-throat saliva samples and return the bottles on Friday and Saturday. Public health experts have recently called for mandatory testing of people with mild symptoms, as well as those with a high risk of exposure to the virus, but such screenings remain voluntary.