Restaurant Cluster Not Affecting Epidemic Much: CHP

The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) on Tuesday said a cluster of Covid cases connected to a restaurant isn't affecting the local epidemic situation that much, as officials reported a total of 273 new infections across the city.

The daily tally was up 40 from Monday.

Twenty-seven of the latest infections were imported.

Officials reported five new Covid-related deaths, bringing the total number in this Omicron outbreak to 9,139.

The CHP's Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan said eight more people linked to the Yuen Long Peony Golden Court restaurant cluster have tested positive, bringing the total number to 20.

"The cluster makes up a small portion of our daily caseload. We decided to trace because we found this cluster when we were looking into certain individual cases, to find out the size of this cluster. It doesn't greatly affect the overall epidemic situation locally," Chuang told reporters.

When asked if restaurants should be ordered to close if they see a certain number of infections, Chuang said there shouldn't be a cut off figure as each cluster may be different.

She said now that social distancing measures have been eased, it's within expectations that the number of infections could rebound a bit, but she noted that the daily numbers have remained in the range of 200 to 300 recently.