Hong Kong health authorities said on Saturday they would adjust COVID testing procedures to allow some people to test from home to ease long queues at designated testing centers, as the city's outbreak proves increasingly hard to control.
Health secretary Sophia Chan said a record 17,063 new COVID-19 daily cases had been recorded, and 66 deaths in the past 24-hours in the city of 7.4 million.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com"The scale of the outbreak is unprecedented and the peak is yet to arrive," she added, with some experts predicting up to 180,000 cases daily in March.
Some Hong Kong families had despaired over strict COVID rules that saw even toddlers in some cases taken away from their parents and isolated, prompting some families to leave the city.The rapid testing kits will "remove long queues and be speedier," said Chan, in an adjustment of the city's COVID policies after criticism from some epidemiologists that such queues actually increased the risk of transmission.
Patients who are in a stable condition would be discharged earlier to free up more hospital beds, and some children allowed to stay at home if only showing mild symptoms.