SAR reports first day in months with no Covid cases

The Centre for Health Protection on Thursday reported no new Covid cases, either local or imported, for the first time since October last year, as Hong Kong continued to keep its coronavirus situation under control.

But an infectious disease specialist, Wilson Lam, sounded a note of caution, warning that more time is needed to confirm whether silent transmission in the community has truly stopped.

“We’re stabilising but we have to look in the coming few days or one or two weeks, make sure that silent transmission is totally gone,” he said.

He noted that the number of people getting vaccinated against Covid-19 has dropped recently. About 2.2 million doses of the Sinovac and BioNTech vaccines had been delivered as of Wednesday, with bookings for jabs continuing to be slow.

“People are still worrying about the safety of the vaccines, from what I discussed with my patients and other doctors,” he said.

“When people are generally feeling better about the situation in Hong Kong, they might not have the urge to (get vaccinated). It’s a bit worrying if these two factors combine, we might not be able to achieve the herd immunity in terms of level that we want to achieve in the coming months.”

Officials also confirmed that a nurse who tested positive for the coronavirus was not actually infected. Further tests showed that traces of the virus in her upper respiratory tract actually came from the Sinovac jab she was working with.