Expert calls to resume tracing of virus in HK

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government needs to boost its epidemiological tracing capacity to maximize the effects of its enhanced testing ability following the success of the city's three-pronged COVID-19 testing in detecting silent transmissions, a local medical expert said on Monday.

The city reported 7,685 new COVID-19 infections on Monday. Among them, 3,227 cases were found through nucleic acid tests and 4,458 from rapid antigen tests.

At Monday's daily COVID-19 news briefing, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said more positive COVID-19 cases have been reported through self-administered rapid antigen tests than from nucleic acid tests in recent days, indicating that the community has widely adopted self-testing.

Lam said that millions of self-test kits will be provided to residents in the citywide distribution of anti-pandemic packages, adding that over 6 million were previously distributed to those in home quarantine.

She also said the government will continue to conduct two types of compulsory testing operations, including mandatory virus testing for certain premises or certain groups of people.

Together with voluntary testing, the three-pronged testing system can identify and cut silent transmission chains as quickly as possible, Lam added.

Local respiratory disease expert Leung Chi-chiu said he believed the current testing arrangement could help the city screen out undiscovered COVID-19 cases, but another priority on the government's agenda should be resuming contact tracing, which has been suspended due to the surge in cases.

Tracing a patient's travel history and identifying close contacts are critical for cutting the chain of transmission, Leung said, and will maximize the effects of the city's enhanced testing ability.

Given the speed with which the Omicron variant is spreading, the target should be to get the nucleic acid test results within 24 hours of completion of the test, and finish the epidemiological tracing for each confirmed case within two days, Leung added.

On Monday, Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the communicable disease branch of the city's Centre for Health Protection, warned against a likely bounce in infections when flows of people increase during holidays next month.

"While today we have over 7,000 cases, I believe the unreported cases or the asymptomatic cases are still considerable," Chuang said.