TST mall staff ordered to take Covid tests

Health officials have ordered everyone working at Tsim Sha Tsui’s K11 MUSEA mall to undergo mandatory Covid-19 tests, as a cluster linked to a restaurant there continues to expand.

On Saturday, authorities reported 15 more new cases linked to the Ming’s Chinese Dining cluster, bringing the tally of infections related to the restaurant to 34 people.

The Centre for Health Protection’s Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan said more than 60 people who’ve visited the restaurant around the same time with the patients have been quarantined, and authorities are still tracing about a dozen more who dined there.

Chuang added everyone working at the K11 MUSEA mall has been ordered to undergo mandatory tests as a precaution.

“We are not sure about the exact risks of those visitors to the K11 Musea. Since we have observed a possibly super spreading event in that restaurant and there are also quite a number of staff and patrons getting infected, it is possible the infections may not just occur in the restaurant because the staff may be infectious during entrance or in the mall,” she said.

She also called on people who’ve been to the mall on or after February 19 to pay attention to their health or get tested.

This comes as authorities reported 33 new cases. Two of them are imported, from the Philippines and India.

The sources of infection for ten local cases could not be identified.

The number of new cases has been slowly climbing since the Chinese New Year holiday, and Chuang said it may have to do with people’s frequent activities during the holiday.

There are around 20 preliminary positive cases.