Hong Kong authorities are “making plans” to subject all of the city’s 7.5 million residents to mandatory testing for COVID-19, the territory’s chief executive announced on Friday. , Carrie Lam.
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“One of the measures that we are preparing, and preparing very seriously, is compulsory universal screening. So we are going to test everyone in Hong Kong,” Ms. Lam said during a press conference, referring to a “critical situation” in the city.
After registering just over 12,000 cases of COVID-19 in the entire first two years of the pandemic at the cost of draconian isolation, Hong Kong is currently facing an exponential progression of the virus linked to the highly contagious Omicron variant. More than 11,000 new cases were recorded on Friday alone, after 12,000 on Thursday, and the hospital system was completely overwhelmed in the space of a few days.
Mass testing of the population is common practice in mainland China, whose authorities observe a “zero Covid” policy which sometimes also leads them to confine entire cities for weeks.
Ms. Lam, however, ruled out confining Hong Kong, a measure difficult to apply to a city whose population density is one of the highest in the world and where housing is often cramped and shared.
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Reference-www.journaldemontreal.com