Hong Kong fourth wave: city to launch ‘new command centre’ to ramp up Covid-19 contact tracing, while Carrie Lam admits past shortcomings
- A government insider says the new centre will be staffed by hundreds of officials from the police force, customs, immigration and other departments
- City leader Carrie Lam says while Hong Kong has done well with testing, quarantine, ‘tracing of close contacts of confirmed cases could have been done better’
The plan for the new centre was finalised at a meeting chaired by the city’s No 2 official and drew lessons from mainland China, sources said on Tuesday. With the expanded monitoring, the government hoped to map out the movements of possible carriers and uncover sources of silent transmissions to stop additional clusters from arising.
Officials on Tuesday confirmed another 32 cases, with four tied to a cluster that emerged at Princess Margaret Hospital, prompting medical authorities to require any patient admitted to day wards across the city to first undergo a Covid-19 test.
“We are doing quite well currently on the testing, quarantine and isolation front, but the tracing of close contacts of confirmed cases could have been done better,” Lam said. “But that also requires the cooperation of residents … and we will train staff to have better techniques in [chasing] these cases.”
Manpower for the command centre, to be housed in a community facility along with hundreds of computers and telephones, would be drawn from the police force, customs, immigration and other departments, a government source said. Some officers from those departments were already carrying out pandemic control work for the Department of Health.