City-wide Covid Testing Is A One-off, Says Govt

The government said on Sunday that its territory-wide coronavirus testing programme was a "one-off" and future efforts would be focused on high-risk groups and tackling any clusters of infection.

With the mainland-backed testing scheme set to come to an end on Monday, Civil Service Secretary Patrick Nip – who has been in charge of the programme – said he expected more than 1.7 million people will have taken part.

At RTHK's City Forum, Nip urged more people to take the opportunity to get tested.

"This a one-off universal community testing programme to help us to understand the infection situation in the community and also to identify and isolate those infected, especially those asymptomatic cases, so as to help us to end the current epidemic," he said.

"In future, with the enhanced and increased testing capacity, I'm sure that we will focus on target group testing, or do rapid and large-scale testing when there are cluster outbreaks."

Meanwhile, Professor David Hui from the Chinese University said Hong Kong would not be able to organise another universal testing programme if it didn't have mainland help again, because it wouldn't be able to check the tens of thousands of samples that would need to be taken each day.

Hui said the fact that the current programme has identified around two-dozen Covid-19 infections means it has been useful in helping to contain the spread of the virus.

"Twenty-three positive cases out of 1.67 million is not a huge number. However, if you had done nothing, these cases would have spread the infection in the community, causing further outbreaks and maybe dragging on the third wave for much, much longer," he said.