New Test Centres Will Free Up Hospital Beds: Doctors

New temporary Covid-19 testing centres set up near the airport will help free up hospital beds and reduce the workload of Hospital Authority staff, the president of the Hong Kong Public Doctors' Association, Arisina Ma, said on Friday.

Ma welcomed the government's move to send anyone arriving in the territory with symptoms of the virus to either North Lantau Hospital or a testing facility at AsiaWorld-Expo, even though she said it would have been better to have brought these measures in sooner.

"This week, there are huge numbers of Hong Kong people returning from foreign countries, quite a number of them with some mild respiratory tract infection symptoms. Before setting up these new checking centres, they were sent to isolation facilities," Ma said.

"Actually, most of them were well and quite a number of them, in the end, their test results were negative."

Ma told RTHK's Candice Wong that diverting such people away from public hospitals will ease the workload on staff quite a lot.

"Currently, our isolation facilities in our hospitals are quite highly occupied, especially because we have had an increased number of confirmed cases this week. Most of the confirmed cases need to stay in the isolation wards for one to two weeks, or even longer."

She added that the government had chosen good locations for the testing centres, being as people's journeys there from the airport will be short. She said although AsiaWorld-Expo is not a medical environment, it is spacious and people will be able to keep their distance from each other.

The Hospital Authority says the testing process is expected to take about half a day. People who test positive for Covid-19 will be sent to an isolation ward at a public hospital, while those who test negative will be told to quarantine themselves at home for 14 days.