Explainer | Hong Kong fourth wave: how to tell if your neighbourhood is next in line for an ‘ambush-style’ coronavirus lockdown
- While the government has not issued formal guidelines for imposing such lockdowns, its messaging in the lead-up to the last two offers insight into its approach
- At present, the most likely candidates for future lockdowns are parts of Jordan, Mong Kok, Hung Hom and Sham Shui Po
Hong Kong’s next “ambush-style” Covid-19 lockdowns could target a handful of old buildings in four coronavirus-hit districts – Jordan, Mong Kok, Hung Hom and Sham Shui Po – where authorities have imposed mandatory testing.
Public health experts said they believed those areas also met the four criteria recently used by officials to justify the two previous lockdowns in Jordan and Yau Ma Tei, making them very likely to be the next areas put under the city’s harshest anti-pandemic measure yet.
What happened in the two previous lockdowns?
Last Saturday at 4am, the government invoked for the first time its newly acquired power to lock down an area, closing off a 500,000 sq ft patch of bustling Jordan district – bordered by Woosung Street, Nanking Street, Battery Street and Kansu Street – in order to enforce compulsory screening of residents.
The operation, which was leaked to the media beforehand, ended 44 hours later at midnight on Monday, and uncovered 13 coronavirus cases among the more than 7,000 people tested – a positive rate of 0.17 per cent. The city’s leader hailed the operation as a success and said the government would implement “smaller-scale, ambush-style restriction testing operations” in the future.