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Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said the city's mass Covid-19 testing will commence when the epidemic situation in Hong Kong maintains a steady downtrend.
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In an interview with Xinhua, the Hong Kong leader said the government's priority has now shifted to make sure Covid patients are isolated and treated promptly, devoting more medical resources to elderly people as infections and deaths climb rapidly amongst the city's mainly unvaccinated seniors.
Lam said authorities are pushing full steam ahead for isolation and quarantine facilities to be built and will increase the number of hospital beds for Covid patients to 16,000 within a short time.
As for the mass testing, Lam said she hoped the testing could commence when the city's epidemic situation maintains a steady downtrend, adding that she will listen to expert advice when the time comes.
She also stated that the mass testing could be repeated to ensure effectiveness.
Meanwhile, speaking at a daily news conference on the pandemic, the Chief Executive said Hong Kong will reopen the city only after the government controls the coronavirus outbreaks.
She said it was not the time to lift the flight bans from nine countries, including the United States and Britain.
"This is not the time to lift the ban. A lot of people will rush to come back...there will be infected cases, and that will add a lot of pressure to our public hospital system," Lam said.
Once the fifth wave is under control, preferably after mass testing contains any lingering routes of transmission, "we will certainly have plans or a pathway to open up Hong Kong again for our own people and for the international travel," she added.
Separately, Secretary for Development Michael Wong Wai-lun said with the conversion of public housing blocks, transitional housing, and more than 30 hotels into isolation facilities, more than 70,000 units and beds will be made available for people with Covid over the next couple of months.
Wong also said six of the eight community isolation facilities built with the help from the mainland are set to come into service this month, with the facilities in Tsing Yi and San Tin already operational.
The other four facilities are located at Hung Shui Kiu near Kai Pak Ling Road, Tam Mei in Yuen Long, a site near Ma Sik Road in Fanling, and a location on the southeastern part of the Hong Kong Boundary Crossing Facilities Island of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge.
As for the other two facilities at Penny's Bay and the former runway area of Kai Tak, they are set to go into service in May.
