Don't Get Together For New Year, Urges Expert

A medical expert advising the government has urged people not to hold gatherings at home over the New Year period, now that the daily number of new coronavirus cases in the SAR has started to slowly go down.

“The numbers had lingered in high figures for a while, now you can see they are obviously on a downward trend, but only slowly,” David Hui told an RTHK radio programme on Wednesday.

The respiratory medicine professor from Chinese University explained that there had been a lot of gatherings and the virus had reached deep into the community during the latest wave of infections.

“Now the most important thing is don’t hold big gatherings,” he said, adding that he noticed there were a lot of family get-togethers over Christmas.

The impact of these gatherings on case numbers has yet to show, Hui warned.

Meanwhile, another respiratory disease expert, Leung Chi-chiu, criticised the government for making a “basic mistake” in tackling the coronavirus over the past year.

Speaking on another radio programme, Leung said the authorities were wrong to relax their social distancing measures as soon as the pandemic situation showed a slight improvement.

But he said administrations around the world have been learning from their mistakes.

Both experts agreed with the government’s decision to now require mandatory coronavirus testing for residents of any building where there are two or more unlinked Covid-19 cases within a fortnight.