Covid Hospital On Lantau To Open Later This Month

A temporary hospital on Lantau for Covid-19 patients will open on the 26th of this month.

Members of the media were on Tuesday given a tour of the North Lantau Hospital Hong Kong Infection Control Centre, near the AsiaWorld-Expo, prior to its official opening.

The beds were already in place at the hospital while other supplies still needed to be put in.

The facility, built with the help of the central government, comprises six double-storey patient blocks and offers 816 isolation beds for those with mild to moderate conditions.

Forty-eight beds will be used in the first stage of the launch, with 15 doctors and 40 nurses deployed.

Elderly patients or those with more severe conditions will be treated at other public hospitals.

"We will receive patients from different categories. The first category is those new cases from the community. They can be sent here directly. And second, we can receive step-up cases from the AsiaWorld-Expo. Nowadays, we have a certain amount of patients staying in the AWE requiring further medical assessment... some of these patients can be transferred here, instead of sending out to the acute hospitals," Dr Jacky Chan from Princess Margaret Hospital, who is in charge of the hospital, said.

"The third group of cases will be the step-down cases from the acute hospitals. For those who suffer from severe disease, once they have stabilised and need further medical care, they can be stepped down here as well," he said.

The hospital also features a medical centre, which houses testing equipment with the capacity of handling up to 1,500 specimens each day.

The deputy hospital chief executive of North Lantau Hospital, Michael Wong, said the laboratory will start operation on February 17, and can enhance testing capacity of public hospitals by up to 15 percent.

"The throughput is very high. We could perform a lot of testing. We actually have a high demand for testing. Every patient admitted needs to have Covid screening, so some of these specimens will come here for the testing, not only for our patients [here]," he said.

The hospital also has separate passageways for patients and staff to prevent cross infection.

The Hospital Authority said when the Covid-19 outbreak is over, the hospital can still be used to treat patients with other infectious diseases or for training of medics.