Govt Testing Finds 32 Positive Cases, 1.8mn Screened

Nearly 1.8 million people were screened for Covid-19 under the government's two-week Universal Community Testing Programme, which ended on Monday.

Just under 1.72 million had their results back by Monday night, of which 32 were positive.

Four of these were former patients declared free of the disease, while at least one other had recovered without knowing they were infected.

Other people flagged up by the mass testing scheme were found to be connected to recent coronavirus outbreaks, particularly a cluster of cases at a Fo Tan factory building.

Some experts said the government testing programme indicated there were somewhere from 40 to 60 silent carriers of the disease in total in Hong Kong.

The head of the Communicable Disease Branch at the Centre for Health Protection (CHP), Chuang Shuk-kwan, said the scheme had proved to be effective.

She said it could help "to find out some of the silent cases, which otherwise may not be found out through the normal testing.programme, because some of them are symptomatic and they are not high-risk groups."

The former controller of the CHP, Thomas Tsang, described the mass screening programme as unprecedented, athough he admitted it will take some time to properly assess its findings.

Tsang told RTHK that the government will have learnt a lot from the exercise.