People wearing face masks walk along a street of Causeway Bay in Hong Kong, Aug 1, 2020. (LO PING FAI / XINHUA)
HONG KONG – The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government on Monday tightened travel rules for 16 countries as the city reported three imported COVID-19 cases.
In a statement, the government upgraded the risk-level categories for the United States and 15 other countries effective Friday due to the “serious threat” posed by the Delta variant.
The global COVID-19 epidemic situation is under serious threat from the Delta variant … Despite large-scale vaccination programmes, many places are also experiencing resurgence of the virus, which poses enormous challenges to our local anti-epidemic efforts.
Spokesman for the HKSAR government
Bangladesh, Cambodia, France, Greece, Iran, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the US will be included in the high-risk group. Australia will be upgraded to the medium-risk category.
“The global COVID-19 epidemic situation is under serious threat from the Delta variant, with acute surges in the number of confirmed cases within a short period of time in many countries. Despite large-scale vaccination programmes, many places are also experiencing resurgence of the virus, which poses enormous challenges to our local anti-epidemic efforts,” a spokesman was quoted as saying in the statement.
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Only vaccinated Hong Kong residents are allowed to fly back to Hong Kong from high-risk places and they are required to undergo 21 days of hotel quarantine.
In a separate statement, the Centre for Health Protection said the three new patients included a 50-year-old man flying in from Switzerland, a 48-year-old man from Japan and 42-year-old man from Malaysia. The new cases took the city’s tally to 12,036.
The traveler from Japan who had been fully vaccinated in Hong Kong with the BioNTech vaccine in May, the CHP said.
Meanwhile, the CHP also said it was investigating a preliminarily positive local case of COVID-19 from an unknown source involving the L452R mutant strain.
The case involves a 47-year-old woman patient who lives at Mei Yat House in Yat Tung (II) Estate in Tung Chung. Preliminary information revealed that the woman, who has not been vaccinated, had no travel history during the incubation period.
She worked as an airline lounge staff member at Hong Kong International Airport and last went to work on Aug 14.
Later in the evening, the government announced in a statement it has cordoned off Mei Yat House so that residents could be tested for COVID-19.
As of Sunday, nearly 3.73 million people in Hong Kong had received at least their first vaccine shot, accounting for 54.8 percent of the city’s population aged 12 or above. Among them, about 2.9 million had been fully vaccinated.
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The vaccination record of residents can be saved digitally in the mobile app iAM Smart, which already had more than 800,000 registered users, the government said.
Ho Pak-leung, head of Hong Kong University’s Centre for Infection, said in a radio interview on Monday that herd immunity can hardly be reached as the virus mutates faster than the jabs being administered.