Covid-19 Cases 'overwhelm Isolation Beds'

The Hospital Authority has warned of the pressure on public hospitals – especially on isolation beds – with dozens of new Covid-19 cases being reported on a daily basis.

Health authorities said there were 59 new cases on Sunday, raising the total in Hong Kong to 641.

Forty of the new cases involved people who travelled outside of Hong Kong recently, including 18 students who returned from overseas.

Of the latest cases without a travel history were close contacts of patients, staff and customers of four bars and their company linked to a cluster of recent cases, as well as six people whose sources of infection are not yet known.

Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan of the Centre for Health Protection said some of these six patients visited bars and attended gatherings not linked to previous cases. She said the bars are in Tsim Sha Tsui, Central, Western and Causeway Bay, but did not name them.

With dozens of new cases being reported in recent days, Dr Sara Ho, Chief Manager (Patient Safety and Risk Management) of the Hospital Authority, said patients with milder symptoms or starting to recover could move out of isolation wards, to give way to those more seriously ill.

Dr Ho expressed regret that some confirmed patients needed to wait for a day before they were admitted to hospital. She hopes the situation would improve when more isolation beds are made available in the coming week.