'People Exempt From Quarantine Behind New Wave'

A top health expert says new analysis of recent coronavirus samples suggests that the current wave of Covid-19 infections was brought in from outside of Hong Kong, most likely by people exempted from mandatory quarantine.

The comments by Gabriel Leung, dean of the faculty of medicine at the University of Hong Kong, go against the government's position that the exemptions did not trigger the recent surge in infections.

Leung says samples taken from recent Covid-19 patients bear little resemblance to earlier strains of coronavirus that affected Hong Kong earlier in the year.

"The current third wave seemed to have had multiple, new introductions that are unlinked to the previous local clusters," he said.

He says that means the current wave of infections was most likely brought in from imported cases by someone who was exempt from having to go into quarantine for two weeks.

Exemptions were put in place for those whose activities are considered essential to the SAR, such as aircrew and seamen, cross-border drivers and certain business people.

"I think that that is the working hypothesis that I have, that it is indeed perhaps under the exempted categories [that there] may have been asymptomatic or very mildly symptomatic individuals, who then went on, perhaps, to have cross-infected, let's say, our public-transport workers, for example taxi drivers, who then congregated in a high-risk setting like a cha chaan teng, and then really seeded at least one or two major local clusters, and then it sort of spread from there," Leung said.

The expert, who's been advising the government on its handling of the pandemic, did not say if they're loopholes in the government's border-control measures. But he made it clear changes are needed.

He said efforts should be made to detect possible new cases at the border, and to quarantine close contacts.

Leung also says new studies of people movements within Hong Kong, using information from the Octopus system, shows that most have been travelling much less over the past fortnight since the latest wave of cases emerged.

That has helped suppress the so-called reproductive number of the virus – or how many people each Covid patient could be expected to infect.

He said the number was higher than three earlier this month, but is now under one. He said this shows the city is heading in the right direction, but it'll take more time for cases to go down.