‘Hong Kong needs Beijing’s help to ramp up testing’

Hong Kong will need Beijing’s support to run more temporary laboratories for Covid-19 tests, the chairman of a testing contractor in Hong Kong said on Monday.

Anthony Wu, chairman of Sunrise Diagnostic Centre, made the comment as a mobile “Fire Eye” laboratory is set to open in Ma On Shan Sports Centre from midnight on Tuesday.

Wu said the new lab will be able to conduct up to 300,000 tests a day using the pooled testing method, or 100,000 tests a day using the single-sample method.

He said the lab should be able to cope with the testing demand coming from daily lockdowns and mandatory testing orders. But he said such testing capacity is still insufficient for mandatory testing of a larger scale.

“If you’re going for the zero-Covid strategy, you need to have the manpower to carry out large-scale testing at the maximum speed. And then you have to narrow [the operation] to smaller areas. That’s how the mainland handled the pandemic,” he said.

Wu said while the hardware for two more makeshift laboratories are expected to arrive in Hong Kong in the next two days, the lack of manpower in Hong Kong remains an issue.

“The three laboratories together could carry out 300,000 single-sample tests a day. If we use the pooled testing method, one million tests could be done in a day. But we need manpower in that case,” he said.

He said the city has already exhausted all its manpower for testing, and the two extra labs could only operate with help from the central government, noting mainland authorities had previously send in around 580 staff to help ramp up the city’s testing capacity in 2020.