Maid Falls Through Cracks In Contact-tracing Mix-up

Health authorities were scrambling on Sunday to find out how a close contact of a known Covid-19 patient spent almost a month in Eastern Hospital without being separated from other patients, even though she was supposed to have been placed in quarantine in July.

The 44-year-old Indonesian helper was only isolated after she tested positive for coronavirus on Saturday after a previous test came back negative, and the Centre for Health Protection (CHP) finally figured out a day later that she had fallen through the cracks of its contact-tracing efforts.

More than fifty people who had close contact with her during her stay at two wards in the hospital will be isolated, though none have tested positive for Covid-19 so far.

The patient was admitted to hospital for leukaemia on July 27 – at around the same time that her employer was confirmed with Covid-19.

However, the CHP’s Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan said the employer’s family did not inform the authorities that the helper had been admitted to Eastern Hospital, and officials mistakenly thought she was with the rest of the family when they were ordered to go into quarantine.

“We thought that she was at home”, Chuang explained. She said officials never spoke to her directly because she didn’t speak English or Chinese well, and instead relied solely on her employer’s family members for information.

Chuang said the authorities did issue a quarantine order for her, “but unfortunately she was already admitted to hospital at that time so the quarantine order was handled by another team… and somehow maybe there was some error in missing out the quarantine.”

“I must apologise for the incident”, Chuang said. “We are still finding out the exact error in not notifying Hospital Authority [about] the case.”

She said officials are looking to improve the system to make it “foolproof”.

This is not the first time language problems have caused confusion – the CHP had earlier mistakenly reported that dozens of foreign domestic helpers exposed to coronavirus had left a boarding house to stay with their respective employers when they were actually still at the hostel.

That error was attributed to communication difficulties due to the language barrier.

A chief manager with the Hospital Authority, Dr Lau Ka-hin, meanwhile, said while the patient did have intermittent fevers since she was admitted, this was consistent with leukaemia and her low white-blood cell count.

He added that she had tested negative for Covid-19 on her first day in hospital.

“I think the doctors [treated] the patient according to symptoms as well as the laboratory result clinically, because patient has leukemia and also low white cell and it’s difficult to exclude other causes of fever for this patient”, he said.

She was only tested for Covid-19 again on Saturday after developing a high fever – which came back positive.