An airline passenger (left) leaves a temporary COVID-19 testing center set up at the AsiaWorld-Expo for arriving passengers in Hong Kong on April 18, 2020.
(ISAAC LAWRENCE / AFP)
HONG KONG - Hong Kong on Tuesday recorded four new COVID-19 cases — all are recent returnees from overseas — bringing the city’s local tally to 1,029.
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A 17-year-old male student tested “weakly positive” again for the virus on Monday, almost two weeks after being discharged from hospital
A 39-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman tested positive for the coronavirus at the temporary test center at AsiaWorld-Expo. The couple had developed symptoms before flying back from the United States on Monday, said Chuang Shuk-kwan of the Centre for Health Protection.
A 13-year-old female student and a 25-year-old man were also confirmed to be infected. Both returned from the United Kingdom on Monday, and neither had shown symptoms.
Meanwhile, a 17-year-old male student tested “weakly positive” again for the virus at a private clinic on Monday, almost two weeks after being discharged from hospital. He was living alone in his family residence before being hospitalized again.
Chuang said the teenager's viral load was quite low and he has shown no symptoms. He is believed to be not contagious, she added.
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Another 20 patients were discharged from hospitals in the past 24 hours, taking the total number of recovered COVID-19 patients to 649, said Lau Ka-hin, the Hospital Authority’s chief manager (quality and standards).
The latest figures came on the same day the government announced a two-week extension of the temporary ban on operations of leisure venues and on public gatherings of more than four people, despite the city’s seeing a 10-day streak of daily new infections in the single digits.
The Centre for Health Protection appealed again to residents to continue social distancing from others to prevent contact with asymptomatic patients and reduce the risk of local transmission.
The center also cautioned a kind of antibiotics test available on the market has not been proved effective in confirming infections, so the public should be alert of it and resort to the commonly adopted nucleic acid test.
