Coronavirus: flexibility urged as tens of thousands of Hong Kong domestic helpers scramble to get tested before deadline

Official figures suggest there are likely another 39,000 helpers who still need to arrange tests over the next three days, on top of the tens of thousands already on the schedule

Advocates have called for authorities to be lenient, as some might not make the cut-off due to work

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Domestic helpers queue up for Covid-19 tests in Causeway Bay. Photo: May Tse

Published: 8:00am, 7 May 2021Updated: 10:58am, 7 May 2021

Nearly 40,000 domestic workers in Hong Kong still need to arrange Covid-19 screenings if they are to meet the Sunday deadline for mandatory testing, though some have called for flexibility on the part of authorities as they scramble to comply with the government order.

On April 30, health authorities ordered the city’s roughly 370,000 domestic helpers to undergo compulsory Covid-19 testing by May 9, a move that was immediately slammed as discriminatory by migrant worker groups and rights activists.

The government, however, defended the move as necessary given the involvement of potentially more virulent mutated strains of the coronavirus. So far, five helpers have been found to be carrying mutated strains, three of them through the mass testing.

Some 201,000 domestic workers were tested between last Saturday and this Tuesday, while another 130,000 were scheduled to be screened by Sunday, according to figures released by the Labour Department.

While those figures do not include Covid-19 specimen samples submitted to the Hospital Authority or private clinics, they suggest another 39,000 helpers still need to be tested over the next three days, on top of the tens of thousands already on the schedule.

“To avoid long wait times on the weekend, we encourage foreign domestic workers to receive testing today and tomorrow as far as possible,” a government spokesman said on Thursday. “We appeal to employers to allow their foreign domestic helpers to receive testing on a weekday.”

The Food and Health Bureau told the Post that “there should be enough slots and methods” for domestic workers to get screened by the deadline. Between Thursday and Sunday, it said, there were still about 39,000 booking slots open at 21 community testing centres across the city.