Covid-19 Patients Urged To Wait For Ambulance

The Hospital Authority on Saturday appealed to quarantined patients who test positive for the coronavirus not to head to the hospital themselves and ambulance will be arranged for them.

Tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents returned to the city as the virus has spread to overseas countries like the UK.

Many of them were asked to provide health authorities with deep throat saliva samples for testing when they were put under mandatory home quarantine in the SAR.

A chief manager with the authority, Dr Sara Ho, said anyone who was notified of a positive result should wait patiently at home for an ambulance while wearing a face mask.

Ho said some patients arranged their own transport and turned up and A&E section of public hospitals after getting messages about their positive test result.

She added that the patients might not be taken to the public hospital closest to their homes because of a rising burden on isolation facilities recently.

Meanwhile, she said that a total of 400 isolation beds would be made available in the coming week for coronavirus patients with milder symptoms, in view of a spike of Covid-19 cases.

She said the so-called second-tier isolation beds would be designated for patients who are in a stable condition, so that the first-tier isolation wards could be freed up for new patients.

“We’ve renovated some of our ordinary wards, across all seven hospital clusters, and equipped them with negative pressure facilities. We’ll continue to try different ways to boost our hospitals’ capacity,” she said.

Health authorities have been expanding the screening on possible coronavirus patients, currently testing more than 2,000 people each day.

The city reported 42 new cases on Saturday, a majority of which involve people who came back from overseas. The latest cases bring the total number of confirmed infections here to 560.