Private Kitchen Cluster Looking Suspicious: Officials

Health officials on Tuesday said they are looking into whether some people linked to a Covid cluster have deliberately misled them, saying the patients' accounts of why they had a visited a private kitchen in Kwun Tong didn't make sense.

Twenty infected people have now been linked to the private kitchen and while earlier patients said they had only picked up takeaways, officials said they have now been told there had been a gathering there with food and drinks.

"When more cases emerged, we tried to learn more because we found something that could not be explained. Some then told us that there were around 40 people together at the private kitchen, some of them don't know each other," said Dr Albert Au from the Centre for Health Protection (CHP).

"There was a gathering between business partners, they had a meeting. Some patients said there was food, they had a drink, some stayed for more than two hours and took their mask off."

At the government's daily Covid press conference, Au said officials have a list of people who had been at the private kitchen at the time in question and investigations are ongoing into whether anyone has violated anti-Covid laws by providing the authorities with false information.

He also said the city has a new restaurant outbreak, with three customers of TamJai Yunnan Mixian in Tung Chung coming down with the virus.

They didn't know each other but sat relatively near one another when they went there for lunch last Wednesday and one was already sick that day, Au said.

The CHP reported a total of 328 new infections, including 39 people returning from overseas. No new deaths were announced.