He said mainland Chinese authorities would speed up the construction of makeshift hospitals, known as “fangcang” or “square cabin”, and a “contingency hospital” in Hong Kong and help the local government to prepare for citywide Covid-19 tests and unite all sectors to win the battle against the pandemic.

As Hong Kong officials raced to secure more facilities for those infected, a Post estimate found more than 50,000 patients were still at home waiting to be sent to government isolation centres or hospitals.

An electronic form to speed up the collection of data from patients and their close contacts to enable faster admission and triage launched on Wednesday morning but crashed by the afternoon, after receiving more than 1,000 responses.

“Don’t give up on the website. We rely on it to get information. Please give it some time if there are delays,” pleaded Centre for Health Protection (CHP) controller Dr Edwin Tsui Lok-kin.

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The latest confirmed cases, three of which were imported, took the official tally to 75,248. The previous daily high was 7,533 confirmed cases on Monday. Officials also received 7,990 “reported infections”, referring to all kinds of cases collected from public and private facilities across the city on a particular day.

The Hospital Authority reported 24 new fatalities, involving patients aged between 52 and 97. Another 19 people, aged 52 to 98, died earlier but the cases were only reported on Wednesday due to a backlog. The city’s Covid-related death toll is now 403.

Twenty-four patients were critically ill, including four who had received two doses of a vaccine, while 43 were in serious condition, with 10 having taken two jabs.

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Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the communicable disease branch at the CHP, said of 153 deaths recorded recently, 90 were patients from care homes with 51 over 70 years old and 29 over 80.

Apart from three young children, including an 11-month-old girl, five of those who died were between 18 and 60 years, with some having underlying illnesses.

Of the first 102 who died, only seven were double vaccinated while the rest were either unvaccinated or had received only one dose. The death per incidence rate was 0.54 per cent for the unvaccinated, 18 times higher than the 0.03 per cent for the vaccinated. “That means the odds of vaccination preventing deaths is very high,” Chuang said.

In terms of geographical distribution, Chuang said infections were more concentrated in January, with the hardest-hit Kwai Tsing district accounting for 52 per cent of the total. She said cases were now “very scattered” across all 18 districts, with the top three – Sham Shui Po, Sha Tin and Yuen Long – each accounting for 10 to 12 per cent of the total.

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Two more designated clinics – the Yau Ma Tei and Cheung Sha Wan Jockey Club general outpatient clinics – have been added to a list of seven treating Covid-19 patients exhibiting mild symptoms such as a cough or fever. Bookings will have to be made.

Officials are also working on the logistics of electronic wristbands and material packs for self-isolating contacts of Covid-19 patients.

The government said an expert delegation that arrived from the mainland on Saturday to help the city tackle the fifth wave of cases would extend its stay.

On Wednesday, the group visited Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital in Chai Wai to understand operations there and conduct in-depth discussions with clinicians on the diagnosis and treatment of Covid-19 cases.

The city’s political elite have also been plagued by infection fears over the past week, with Undersecretary for Innovation and Technology David Chung Wai-keung becoming the first senior official to test preliminary-positive, after two chauffeurs from his bureau were reported as infected.

Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung’s wife and domestic helper also tested positive on Wednesday but he returned negative results, the government revealed in the evening.

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The statement said Tang and other family members would need to undergo 14 days of home isolation, while his wife and helper were waiting for admission to isolation facilities or hospitals. Tang will work from home during the isolation period.

Lawmaker Alice Mak Mei-kuen, of the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions, also tested preliminary-positive after undergoing a rapid antigen screening.

Mak, 50, wrote on her Facebook page on Wednesday that she had used the kit after several of her family members tested preliminary-positive. The lawmaker said she would work from home while waiting for confirmation from a deep throat saliva test.

Health experts have also warned that Hong Kong could uncover tens of thousands of silent coronavirus carriers when universal testing begins next month, urging the government to secure enough isolation facilities to accommodate them before undertaking the scheme.

Professor Lau Yu-lung, who chairs the government’s Scientific Committee on Vaccine Preventable Diseases, said that based on the number of cases uncovered in localised mass testing operations, it was possible the citywide screening could identify up to 300,000 new infections, equivalent to just under 5 per cent of the city’s population.

Lau’s warning came as the University of Hong Kong (HKU) revised its model for the outbreak, which now anticipates the fifth wave will peak between early to mid-March.

The project also predicted more than 180,000 infections and 2,800 patients admitted to hospitals daily during the peak, if the current policies continued and authorities did not impose circuit-breaker, citywide lockdowns.

The team behind the model estimated that the current path would result in 100 recorded deaths per day by the end of March, resulting in 3,200 cumulative fatalities by mid-May.

Researchers at HKU previously predicted about 28,000 infections a day during a possible peak in March, but said they had revised their model after overestimating the effectiveness of current social-distancing measures.

The university’s medical faculty has also begun preparing for a real-time community surveillance scheme to track how quickly the coronavirus is spreading throughout the city. The study will recruit 10,000 Hongkongers, who must undergo rapid antigen tests weekly and lateral flow immunoassays blood tests monthly and upload their data online in real-time.

The medical faculty said the scheme could fill gaps in the data created by the constraints of official testing.

Lau also noted it was common for the peak of an outbreak to last as long as two weeks, but identifying and isolating hidden cases could reduce that time frame.

He added that it was not necessary to combine the mass screening with a full lockdown. Instead, Hong Kong could refer to the practice in mainland China, where a certain level of crowd control was imposed, but stopped short of a total lockdown.

Meanwhile, Professor David Hui Shu-cheong, a respiratory medicine expert from Chinese University, suggested Hong Kong learn from the approach taken in Melbourne, where only one person per household was allowed to go out once or twice a week to buy necessities.