Coronavirus: Hong Kong may keep tighter social-distancing rules in place another five weeks, while school campuses to remain shut until after Lunar New Year
- Measures extended two weeks and chance of relaxing them before the holiday is unlikely, health chief says as she reveals 53 new cases
- Suspension of face-to-face classes for most schools to continue into February, education minister announces
Health authorities announced on Monday that current measures such as the ban on public gatherings of more than two people and restaurant dine-in services after 6pm would be extended for another two weeks, while the suspension of face-to-face classes for most schools would continue until the end of the Lunar New Year holiday in February.
Officials confirmed another 53 infections, six of them untraceable, even as they reported a new coronavirus outbreak among patients and medical staff at a public hospital, and revealed that nearly a dozen of Monday’s new cases came from a major construction site.
“The government will continue the current measures for two more weeks until January 20. Based on the current situation, the chance of relaxing the measures before the Lunar New Year is unlikely,” health minister Professor Sophia Chan Siu-chee said.
“The number of cases is going down, [but] not as fast as we would like to see in terms of the overall downward trend. If there is a significant rebound of cases, we will not rule out adopting more stringent measures to further reduce the flow of people and group gatherings.”
Chan noted that more than 90 per cent of the 812 new infections logged between December 21 and January 3 were locally transmitted, while about a third were from unknown sources.
Professor Yuen Kwok-yung, a government adviser on the pandemic response, agreed the government was highly unlikely to ease measures when the daily caseload was “hovering at 40”.