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More than 200 diners and 22 staff at Moon Palace have been sent to quarantine. Photo: Felix Wong

Omicron variant: come forward or face legal action, Hong Kong authorities warn 6 diners as cluster linked to restaurant grows

  • Cluster linked to Moon Palace restaurant now comprises five confirmed cases and a preliminary-positive infection but six people have yet to come forward for tests
  • Professor David Hui says contact-tracing improvements are required to ‘Leave Home Safe’ app given that some identified as close contacts are ‘uncooperative’
Health authorities trying to contain an expanding outbreak of the highly contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus in a Hong Kong restaurant urged exposed diners still at large to come forward or face consequences, as they identified more infections on Monday.

Officials said they had confirmed one more infection and identified another preliminary-positive case originating from the Moon Palace restaurant at the Festival Walk shopping centre in Kowloon Tong.

The new suspected case, if confirmed, would take the total number of Omicron cases in this cluster to six since the first was detected on December 29 after an infected Cathay Pacific flight attendant flouting quarantine rules to dine at the restaurant was found to have exposed others to the variant.

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Health authorities confirmed 29 new Covid-19 cases overall on Monday, the highest since April 18 last year when 30 were recorded.

All but one of the confirmed cases were imported, including a Cathay Pacific pilot who had recently returned from Melbourne. Twenty-six cases were found with the N501Y and T478K strains, indicating a high likelihood of the Omicron variant.

Officials on Monday also reported 40 more preliminary-positive cases. If confirmed the next day, it would see a further surge in the city’s total infection count, which now stands at 12,721, with 213 related deaths.

The latest confirmed Omicron case tied to Moon Palace was a 38-year-old woman who had dined there on December 27 – the day the Cathay employee visited – with a family member found to be infected earlier.

She was sent to the government quarantine centre at Penny’s Bay on December 30, and tested negative the next day. She developed a sore throat on New Year’s Day and was sent to Tuen Mun Hospital where she tested positive. A subsequent screening there found her viral load had increased.

Nine of her work colleagues at a Tsuen Wan office, along with 20 of their household members, were classified as close contacts and sent to quarantine.

A restaurant-linked preliminary-positive infection also emerged, involving a 66-year-old woman who dined there with eight family members.

The retiree, who lives at Block 2 of Granville Garden in Tai Wai, had tested negative twice before, once upon arrival at Penny’s Bay on New Year’s Eve and also at a community centre in Lek Yuen two days earlier. Authorities sealed off her building on Monday evening for overnight compulsory testing of residents.

The woman had visited a number of premises in Sha Tin including Peking House restaurant in New Town Plaza and a Cafe de Coral branch in Mei Lam Estate before being quarantined.

Moon Palace in the Festival Walk shopping centre. Photo: Felix Wong

Authorities have deemed 207 diners as close contacts, with 201 sent to Penny’s Bay quarantine centre along with 22 restaurant staff.

But with six restaurant patrons still to come forward, Dr Albert Au Ka-wing of the Centre for Health Protection issued a blunt warning.

“I urge the six diners who have not come forward for compulsory tests to get tested or contact us at hotlines on 2125 1111 and 2125 1122,” he said. “If they do not comply with the compulsory testing notice, we will take legal action against them.”

Au said the authorities “had no way” to contact them even though they might have used the government’s “Leave Home Safe” risk exposure app to enter the restaurant.

“They probably used the app and already received the notification [for testing], but we currently have no way to reach them, so we are not sure if they have done the testing already,” he said.

Hong Kong Omicron restaurant cluster grows with patron’s wife a potential case

Au said Penny’s Bay had enough rooms to accommodate the rising number of close contacts. Compulsory testing was also extended to all visitors to Festival Walk between 1pm and 5pm on December 27, he said.

Earlier on Monday, government pandemic adviser Professor David Hui Shu-cheong said the “Leave Home Safe” app should be upgraded to enable officials to more quickly find people potentially exposed to the coronavirus.

“It needs to be done now that we have these faster-spreading variants. Without software like this it makes contact tracing really difficult,” Hui told a radio show.

Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan Siu-chee said Hong Kong’s existing health code – set up for the eventual resumption of cross-border travel to mainland China – could satisfy such objectives, but did not state whether its use locally might be made compulsory.

The code relies on QR technology to record the names and addresses of users and for tracing the contacts of Covid-19 patients.

It is embedded in the “Leave Home Safe” app but is only mandatory for those wanting quarantine free-travel to the mainland, a pending scheme to be initially limited to Guangdong province.

The local version of the app, which does not require the provision of personal details, notifies users if they are deemed to be close contacts of Covid-19 patients. But it is then a matter for individuals to get tested for the coronavirus.

The Innovation and Technology Bureau said the app had been downloaded 7.35 million times. Some 726,000 users had created a health code account, of which 78 per cent or 568,000 were activated, the bureau added.

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“We’re going to do our best to keep the cluster at Moon Palace under control,” Chan said. “If we were finding infections that couldn’t be linked to the cluster or cases in multiple districts, we would be more worried, but we are not quite there yet.”

Earlier, Chan warned the city was at a “tipping point” and feared a fast-spreading outbreak of Omicron – a highly transmissive but so far less severe variant of the coronavirus – as authorities continued the race against time to track down all relevant diners.

Hui stopped short of calling for stepped up social-distancing measures on the basis that there have not been any other transmissions outside the Moon Palace cluster.

He said the discovery of untraced infections or several cases across the city would signal the start of a fifth wave of the coronavirus.

Fellow adviser Professor Gabriel Leung, dean of the University of Hong Kong’s faculty of medicine, called the next two weeks a “critical observation period”.

He also said the city should be in a “holding pattern” for now. But if there was third-generation transmission from patrons of the Omicron-hit restaurant locally, the city should be in a position to quickly upscale social-distancing rules within 24 hours, Leung said.

The first generation was imported Omicron cases and the second involved the aircrew member who infected two diners.

Meanwhile, the government will move Bulgaria to its high-risk Group A category from Thursday. Non-residents are barred from travelling to the city from places listed in the category, while residents must undergo 21 days of hotel quarantine on arrival.

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