An elderly man who gave his name as Hung said he had been waiting for a few hours outside the community centre.

“There are a lot of elderly coming here. It is an estate [with a lot of elderly residents]. Not everyone is young,” he told the media.

“I’ve been standing here for a few hours. My legs are weak and I have to do the test six times,” he added, referring to the requirement on the testing frequency for those who had visited the 18 places.

A woman surnamed Law said she did not manage to do the test on Tuesday, so she visited the centre again on Wednesday.

“I received a letter last night at 6pm. But when I went to On Ting/Yau Oi, the centre had already stopped accepting newcomers, so my friend told me to go to Yuen Long. But the centre at Yuen Long also stopped accepting newcomers,” she said. “I think I’ll get sick walking around and waiting like this.”

Tuen Mun district councillor Wong Hung-ming said the situation on Tuesday was chaotic as there were not enough testing stations.

“The residents were quite irritated as the weather was quite cold and they had to wait for a few hours,” he said.

Among them included a housewife surnamed Chan, who complained about the three-hour wait at Siu Lun Community Hall on Tuesday.

“It was very chaotic because only a few testing centres were open and many people were lining up outside them. With all the residents gathering outside the testing centres, I’m afraid that the virus will spread if one of the people in line was infected with Covid-19,” the 53-year-old said.

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Resident Dennis Wong said he waited for more than five hours outside On Ting/Yau Oi Community Centre to get tested. He had arrived at 3.45pm to find about 400 people already in line, and could not get in until 9pm.

“It was freezing outside and I was wearing just a jacket and T-shirt as I didn’t expect to wait until nighttime. No staff outside the centre provided instructions and we didn’t know how long we would have to wait. The arrangement was terrible,” the 26-year-old said, adding he would visit testing centres in other districts to avoid the crowd.

Wong said he received the testing order as he had visited H.A.N.D.S shopping centre in On Ting Estate, the location of a pharmacy whose 47-year-old owner was among the eight local coronavirus infections announced on Tuesday.

The pharmacy owner’s 20-year-old daughter, who worked at the store, 11-year-old son and 45-year-old wife also tested positive this week.

It was confirmed that they were linked to a Cathay Pacific male flight attendant, who lives in Tuen Mun and visited the pharmacy on December 27. The aircrew member, who was later verified to have the Omicron variant, had infected nine people at Moon Palace restaurant at the Festival Walk shopping centre in Kowloon Tong.

A 51-year-old Penny’s Bay quarantine centre security guard, who lives in Tuen Mun, also tested positive. Investigation into whether she caught the virus at the facility or in the district was ongoing.

Some residents who did not receive any testing orders also went for screening amid concerns about the spread of the Omicron variant. Among them was Johnson Wong Ka-chun, 16, who joined a queue of 100 people at a testing station at Kin Sang Community Hall in Tuen Mun at about 5pm on Wednesday.

“We know that some students of my school went to the shopping centre and have to do the screening. The school didn’t ask us to do the testing but we are worried about it,” said the teenager, who had come with three of his classmates.

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Paul Wong, a 34-year-old insurance broker, spent about 30 minutes waiting outside the centre to get tested after his family members asked him to.

“I’m glad that more testing stations are open. Otherwise, I might not get tested if the line was too long,” he said.

Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the Centre for Health Protection’s communicable disease branch, suspected the emergence of hidden transmission chains in Tuen Mun, and on Tuesday warned the general public to avoid activities in the area.

Omicron: Hong Kong to suspend classes, fears grow over ‘high-risk’ Tuen Mun

One of the contractors who operated two testing stations on Tuesday said they closed the centre four hours later than the designated time of 8pm to allow more residents to undergo testing.

“We did about 7,000 tests in total yesterday. We’ll operate six stations today. I expect to carry out 15,000 to 18,000 tests today,” Phase Scientific chairman Ricky Chiu Yin-to said on Wednesday. “We have increased the number of nurses doing the testing from 12 to 40 today.”

Chiu said testing capacity was close to saturation on Tuesday, adding the staff might have to work overtime on Wednesday. He suggested the government set up more testing stations, while residents could also opt to head to similar centres in nearby districts.