All but four of the new cases are local infections.
The new “notification figure” adds up all the cases the Centre for Health Protection (CHP) has been informed about over the past 24 hours from both public and private laboratories, and covers both preliminary positive and confirmed cases.
At a press conference, the Hospital Authority’s Lau Ka-hin said the patients who died were aged between nine and 100, and 42 of them were unvaccinated.
Lau also announced the deaths of a further 12 patients which occurred between February 21 and 23 but had yet to be reported.
As of Thursday night, 51 patients were in a critical condition and 48 were seriously ill, he said.
Lau made an appeal for people with mild symptoms or none at all not to rush to accident and emergency units at public hospitals which are inundated with patients.
Chuang Shuk-kwan of the CHP, meanwhile, noted that there has been a clear increase in the number of Covid cases.
“Whether we can control this, it actually involves a lot of aspects. Isolation facilities is one of them, and they’re seriously insufficient now. The other is social distancing, but that depends on whether citizens will cooperate, like whether people are staying at home and whether companies are having work-from-home arrangements as far as they can,” Chuang said.
“I saw that there is still a considerable amount of people on the streets nowadays,” she added.
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USEFUL LINKS
General Covid-19 situation: https://www.coronavirus.gov.hk/eng/
Covid-19 testing: https://www.communitytest.gov.hk/en/
Compulsory testing notices: https://www.chp.gov.hk/en/features/105294.html
Community Clinics for Covid-19 patients: https://bit.ly/35nnudX
Vaccination programme: https://www.covidvaccine.gov.hk/en/
Vaccination pass scheme: https://www.coronavirus.gov.hk/eng/vaccine-pass.html
Hotline for Covid-positive patients: 1836 115
