Hong Kong’s schools to close again as Covid infections spike

HONG Kong will close all schools from Monday after a spike in locally transmitted coronavirus infections, its education minister said yesterday.

Schools will bring forward the summer holidays, Kevin Yeung said, after the city recorded an “exponential growth” in the past few days.

The finance hub recorded 38 new confirmed cases yesterday, 32 of which were locally transmitted.

The spike marks a setback for the city, where daily lives were returning to normal with restaurants, bars and cultural attractions reopening.

Despite being next to mainland China where the outbreak emerged in late 2019, the city had largely managed to quash local transmissions.

But new infection clusters started to emerge on Tuesday, including at an elderly care home that reported at least 32 cases and a housing estate that reported 11 cases.

At least 21 infections in the last five days have been classified as unknown in origin, meaning authorities are struggling to work out how the disease is spreading.

Authorities were facing “difficulties” in tracing the sources and the close contacts of those infected in the new cluster, said Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan from Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection.

Hong Kong’s public high schools closed in January in the early stages of the outbreak and were gradually reopened from May after the territory successfully curbed new infections.

Mr Yeung said that schools would still be allowed to hold important examinations.

Health authorities also reintroduced limits on how many people can gather in restaurants, bars and fitness centres.

A maximum of eight people can sit together at restaurants while bars, pubs and nightclubs are capped at four people per table.

Hong Kong has reported 1,403 cases of the virus and seven deaths.