‘If anyone can get to the bottom of it, Hong Kong can,’ doctor says.
After 23 days without a locally transmitted coronavirus case and with much of the city returning to normal life, health officials here are investigating how a 66-year-old woman and her granddaughter tested positive.
The test results, announced Wednesday, illustrate the continuing challenges for authorities world-wide in eliminating the disease even in places that were successful with containment earlier on.
Seven close contacts of the woman have shown symptoms and have been sent to the hospital for testing, officials said Wednesday. The woman has no recent history of travel and hasn’t had contact with known carriers of the disease, officials said. They added that they plan to test residents of their apartment buildings.
The positive results drew a collective sigh from Hong Kongers who have been slowly resuming their normal life routines. Some government health advisers have set a mark of 28 days—or two quarantine periods without a local infection—as a key milestone toward victory over the coronavirus. The two new infections bring the total recorded in the city of about 7.5 million residents to 1,051, with four deaths—which is still relatively low.
The cases “show that there is an invisible transmission link in the community because we haven’t yet found an obvious source,” said Dr. Chuang Shuk-kwan from the city’s Centre for Health Protection. “Of course we can’t rule out that there might be more cases and even community outbreaks,” she said.
While details are still murky, one possibility is that the woman contracted Covid-19 from an asymptomatic carrier, said Dr. David Owens, founder of Hong Kong medical practice OT&P Healthcare.
“We are going to see episodic cases” in Hong Kong even as the government works to contain the coronavirus, he said.
“If anyone can get to the bottom of it, Hong Kong can,” he said, referring to the origin of the new infections.
The virus spreads through “respiratory droplets” when an infected person speaks, coughs or sneezes, according to the WHO.
Health experts say measures that have so far kept the disease at bay in the city without imposing a strict lockdown include the near-universal wearing of masks, tracing the contacts of virus carriers and strict quarantining.
The city contained an initial outbreak brought by travelers from Wuhan, China, where the pandemic first emerged late last year, and then a second wave as travelers mostly from the West carried it back to the city, sparking clusters linked to bars and gyms. The government closed some of those facilities in February and introduced social distancing measures, though it has begun to relax restrictions.
In recent weeks, as days passed with no new infections reported, people headed out more to beaches and shopping malls. They are also socializing in groups again—limited to eight at a time—in bars and restaurants. Officials have been discussing how and when schools, which have been closed since late January, should reopen. Some older students are due to return to classes later this month, while international schools are allowed to reopen next week.
The new infections in Hong Kong come as countries around the world struggle to keep the pandemic at bay, in some cases even after strict efforts seemed to initially contain them.
South Korea, which was hit hard earlier this year but beat back an initial wave of infections, has pushed back the reopening of schools by a week following the discovery of a new cluster of cases connected to nightclubs and bars in Seoul.
In mainland China, seven provinces have reported new locally transmitted cases over the past two weeks, according to the country’s National Health Commission. Authorities in the city of Wuhan fired a local official after six new Covid-19 cases were confirmed last weekend in a housing complex under his jurisdiction. They were the first fresh cases recorded in Wuhan in about a month.
Globally, confirmed cases surpassed 4.26 million Wednesday, with about 1.37 million in the U.S., according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Deaths have passed 291,000 world-wide, with about a third in the U.S.
By WSJ