The new “notification figure” adds up all the cases the Centre for Health Protection has been informed about over the past 24 hours from both public and private laboratories, and covers both preliminary positive and confirmed cases.
For the day, 8,798 confirmed cases were reported.
The Hospital Authority said a nine-year-old boy, who tested positive for Covid-19, passed away on Thursday morning.
A chief manager at the authority, Lau Ka-hin, said the chronically ill boy was unconscious and his heart had stopped beating when he arrived at United Christian Hospital in the morning. He died soon afterwards.
“The parents told us, the patient had some tiredness and a decrease in appetite [on Wednesday night]. But there was no other upper respiratory tract infection symptoms, no fever, no convulsion,” Lau told a press conference.
He said the case will be sent to the coroner’s court for further investigation.
Lau added that another 50 Covid patients – aged between 52 and 97 – had died over the past day. Among them, 42 were unvaccinated.
Separately, 17 other patients – aged between 68 and 93 – died on Monday and Tuesday. Lau said their deaths weren’t announced until Thursday due to a backlog in reporting.
Meanwhile from Saturday, all 300 beds at Tin Shui Wai Hospital will be used to treat Covid-19 patients.
Non-Covid patients currently staying there will be transferred to other hospitals, while the accident and emergency department will continue its normal operations.
The Hospital Authority also urged patients who are suffering only mild symptoms not to call an ambulance or seek treatment at A&E units, saying public hospitals are inundated.
Lau called on people to make good use of the nine designated Covid-19 clinics across Hong Kong.
Infectious disease expert Leung Chi-chiu said unless the government can improve the delay in testing, and manage to send patients into isolation in a timely manner, it would be difficult to reverse the upward trend.
“I think is not the problem of social distancing measures, it’s more because we fail to detect these cases early and isolate the detected cases,” he told RTHK.
“That’s in fact paralysing our conventional control measures and that’s the reason why we have not been able to reverse the exponential increases in the cases in the past month.”
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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/
Hotline for Covid-positive patients: 1836 115
