Bookings for coronavirus vaccines jump eightfold in Hong Kong after eligibility expanded to cover most of population
- Online bookings for the two vaccines on offer jump to 144,000 from 18,600 a day earlier
- City confirms 18 new infections, five of which are tied to Ursus Fitness in Sai Ying Pun
Online bookings for the two Covid-19 vaccines jumped to 144,000 from 18,600 a day earlier, while three of the 19 centres offering the BioNTech vaccine and 17 of the 18 public clinics providing the Sinovac shots were fully booked for the next two weeks or more.
The city confirmed 18 new infections on Tuesday – 13 locally transmitted and five imported. Of the local cases, five were linked to Ursus Fitness, the Sai Ying Pun gym at the centre of the latest super-spreading cluster.
Two of the latest confirmed cases were untraceable – a 38-year-old man who worked at HSBC headquarters in Central and last went to the office on Monday, and a 41-year-old woman who is a US consulate staff member and was most recently at work on Friday.
The woman’s husband, who is also her work colleague, was confirmed to be infected as well and is believed to have contracted the virus from her. One of their daughters has also tested preliminary-positive, pending official confirmation.
HSBC would also temporarily close its main Central headquarters after discovering three cases, a source said. Authorities also issued a compulsory testing order for the building, requiring anyone who visited the premises for more than two hours since March 3 to undergo screening.
The five new Ursus Fitness cases took the total number of infections in the gym cluster to 127. The citywide infection tally now stands at 11,329, with 203 related deaths. About 10 preliminary-positive cases were also logged on Tuesday.