Hong Kong Logs 29,381 New Covid Cases

Health authorities on Friday reported 29,381 new Covid-19 infections and almost 300 deaths, but said there appear to be signs that Hong Kong's outbreak is now under control.

Officials said 18,888 of the new infections were confirmed by laboratories after PCR tests, while 10,493 were reported by people who took their own rapid tests.

Albert Au from the Centre for Health Protection said although the daily numbers of new infections have stopped increasing, they are still hovering between 30,000 and 50,000.

Au said authorities need to observe the situation for another one or two weeks to see if there's a downward trend, adding that there are still many chains of transmission in the community.

“The epidemic situation recently seems to have been brought under control, as there wasn’t an exponential increase. But it’s difficult to predict the future trend just based on figures from one or two days,” said Au.

“The situation seems to have stabilised, but we still don’t see a sign that indicates cases are going down. We still need to observe for some time.”

The Hospital Authority said 196 Covid patients, aged between 24 and 107, died in the past day.

Officials said the youngest patient to die was a care home resident who suffered from a hereditary disease.

The officials also announced a further 98 deaths that occurred between February 28 and March 9.

The authority's chief manager Sara Ho, meanwhile, apologised for the fact that some corpses could not be removed from hospital wards immediately because the mortuaries were full.

She said to rectify the situation, refrigerated containers have been installed on hospital grounds to store bodies.

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