Isolation hotels to turn into quarantine hotels: CE

Chief Executive Carrie Lam said on Wednesday that work is underway to convert some hotels currently used for isolation purposes into designated hotels for inbound arrivals to undergo quarantine.

Since February, the government enlisted more than 20 hotels to serve as community isolation facilities as the city battles the Omicron outbreak.

At a virtual Legco question-and-answer session, Federation of Trade Unions lawmaker Alice Mak said the occupancy rate of such isolation hotels has remained low.

She asked the CE whether the government would consider turning them into designated hotels, so arrivals, including returning Hong Kong residents and foreign domestic helpers, could stay there for quarantine when the city cancels its current flight ban on nine countries from April.

In response, Lam said the government is now discussing the matter with some of these hotels.

She said with sufficient isolation facilities now in place, some isolation hotels are not being used fully.

“Because [a hotel] cannot accept different types of people. It can either be an isolation hotel or a quarantine hotel. We’re now working on this.”

“Some hotels have already taken in people under isolation. And we have to wait for the isolated people to leave the hotel, and then the entire hotel will have to be disinfected and cleaned before it can allow pre-booking by Hong Kong residents returning from overseas or foreign domestic helpers coming to work here.”

Lam said more details would be announced later.

When asked by lawmaker Wendy Hong whether the government would consider allowing incoming foreign domestic helpers to be quarantined at newly built makeshift hospitals, Lam said she believes the government should let local hotels do the work initially.

She noted that the occupancy rate of hotels is not high, adding that hotels would be a better option because they have booking systems in place to handle reservations.