HONG KONG – Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po said on Sunday that application for the HK$10,000 cash handout for every adult Hong Kong permanent resident would start in early July until March 31, 2021.

The cash subsidy, announced in the budget for the fiscal year beginning April 1, aims at boosting local consumption and providing relief for families at a time when the economy and people’s livelihoods are battered by the global outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

Writing in his blog, Chan said the government would try to distribute the cash handout as early as in the summer holiday by working with banks to simplify the application and distribution procedure. 

Separately, Chief Secretary for Administration Matthew Cheung Kin-ching paid tribute to the volunteers who have worked behind-the-scene in the fight against the spread of the epidemic. In his Sunday blog, Cheung said that many civil servants, including some who have retired, were among those volunteers.

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Cheung expressed gratitude to all volunteers, saying they are the “unsung heroes”.

According to Cheung, more than 200 volunteers from the Discipline Services and the government’s different departments worked at the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer to verify the real-time locations of people under compulsory home-quarantine and provide assistance for them. Every day, a volunteer worker needs to contact about 100 people who are undergoing the quarantine. 

In addition, technology is a crucial weapon in the war with the deadly disease, Secretary for Innovation and Technology Nicholas Yang Wei-hsiung said in his blog posted on Sunday.

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According to him, it took Hong Kong less than one month to set up a smart wristbands production line with a monthly output of over 3,000 units. The government have used the wristbands to locate people who are under mandatory quarantine. 

Yang said the government this week will optimize the tracing system and use a new application co-developed by a Hong Kong tech company and local universities to track down the location of quarantined people more accurately. 

Contact the writer at kathyzhang@chinadailyhk.com