New karaoke cluster among a surge in HK virus infections

Hong Kong is seeing a surge in local infections, as 1 in 4 patients who caught the novel coronavirus in the past week was infected locally. Among the 32 new confirmed cases on Tuesday, four people came from a group of seven at a karaoke gathering.

Five of the group who went to karaoke bar Red MR in Tsim Sha Tsui on March 24 have been confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus.

Leung Chi-chiu, chairman of the Advisory Committee on Communicable Diseases under the Hong

Kong Medical Association, said the first thing to do is to shut down all karaoke parlors for 14 days.

People are not wearing masks when singing for hours, which can produce large amounts of droplets in small, poorly ventilated rooms, Leung warned.

Leung noted that the increase in local infections can be regarded as a small-scale community outbreak — when several small cluster infections occurred.

If the number of local infections continues to soar, it will snowball into large-scale community outbreak sooner or later, where hundreds or thousands of people from the same group are infected, he warned.

As of Tuesday, there are 1,016 isolation beds in the city, and 66 percent of them are occupied, Lau Kahin, chief manager of quality and standards at the Hospital Authority, told a press briefing.

However, at least 12 new patients were waiting to be admitted to public hospitals, as only 828 isolation beds are for general adult patients; the rest 188 is in the intensive care units or are for children, Lau noted.

Also at the briefing, Wong Ka-hing, controller of the Centre for Health Protection of the Department of Health, said the city now has about 1,700 units at quarantine centers — mostly for close contacts of patients. Currently, only 20 to 30 percent of these units are unoccupied, he said.

When the capacity is nearly full, the authorities will consider allowing some people to be quarantined for only 10 days at the center, and the remaining four days at home, to vacant units sooner, Wong said.

Those people put under home quarantine should be asymptomatic, low-risky and test negative for the virus before leaving the center, Wong said. Health authorities will also evaluate whether their household environment is suitable for a four-day home quarantine, he added.

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong government will send a chartered flight to bring home Hong Kong residents stranded in Peru, which has declared a state of emergency and tightened traffic restrictions because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The chartered flight is set to leave Peru’s capital, Lima, for London on Friday. Evacuees will have to pay for the seats reserved for them on the following flight, from London to Hong Kong, a government spokesman said on Tuesday night.