Some Hospital Staff Now Getting Regular Covid Tests

The Hospital Authority said on Thursday that 5,000 members of staff who care for vulnerable patients are getting Covid tests on a voluntary basis every two weeks, although those looking after people who are known to have the virus are not included.

The authority said 90 percent of those caring for cancer and elderly patients took a test provided by in-house labs last month, with no infections found.

A second round of testing will be conducted on Friday by outsourced labs in order not to strain the authority's testing capability.

The authority's chief infection control officer, Doctor Raymond Lai, said the authority wants to focus on those workers looking after patients with a weak immune system for the time being.

"Imagine if they [the patients] catch the infections, they will be likely to have severe complications... so our main target is to provide regular testing for the staff to rule out any asymptomatic infections, so they will not pass their infections to the immunocompromised patients," he said.

Lai said the authority hopes to test all frontline workers in future, including staff looking after Covid patients, but they aren't being given priority as they work in negative pressure wards where virus transmissions are less likely to occur.

The doctor added that medical staff are not exposed to a higher risk of catching the virus than other people, saying the number of infections among healthcare workers fluctuates with the overall trend in the city.

He admitted that previous outbreaks at United Christian Hospital and Princess Margaret Hospital were probably due to a patient passing the virus on to staff and other patients, but said more than 95 percent of staff at the two hospitals have taken coronavirus tests since the outbreaks, with only one positive case found.