340,000 Make Bookings To Go To Mainland: Govt

The government's top IT official says more than 340,000 people booked places to travel to the mainland in the first 24 hours after the quota website opened.

Tony Wong, acting chief information officer, said on Friday that there were queues when the website went live at 6pm on Thursday, but by an hour later, people could book without waiting.

Some 50,000 places per day are available at three land checkpoints from Sunday until March 4, with a further 10,000 people expected to travel to the mainland by air, sea, or on buses across the bridge to Zhuhai.

On an RTHK radio programme, Wong said plenty of spaces remained.

"We can now see that around a dozen time slots at some individual border checkpoints are already fully booked. But I want to stress that at the same checkpoints, on the same day, there are still vacancies at different time slots," he said.

"If people must choose a certain time on a certain day, they can also choose other checkpoints."

DAB lawmaker Ben Chan, who spoke on the same programme, said he believes the daily quota is enough to cater to those who need to go to the mainland during Lunar New Year.

"With the pandemic situation on the mainland now, I believe people will not swarm to go there. So those going probably have important or urgent matters to deal with, or they really want to visit their relatives there," he said.

Chan said he hopes the authorities will soon increase the quota for cross-border travel, if everything goes smoothly.

Meanwhile, Chris Wong, a Covid testing station contractor, said Hong Kong has enough testing capacity to handle demand once the border further reopens.

But Wong, from the Hong Kong Molecular Pathology Diagnostic Centre, called on the authorities to allow test results to be submitted digitally, instead of in paper form, saying this would be more convenient for people travelling across the border.

The government later said that starting Friday, travellers who pay for a Covid test can download an electronic copy of their result from a government website.

In a separate statement, it said that cross-border truck drivers will no longer need to get tested at checkpoints from Sunday, adding that they only need to produce the result of a negative PCR test done up to 48 hours before their journey.