Officials fear another gym has a Covid outbreak

Health officials on Friday warned of another possible Covid outbreak at a gym after a 38-year-old woman came down with the virus.

Health authorities said the patient attended pilates and yoga classes at GO24 Fitness in North Point. Two dozen customers and instructors who were in the same classes were being sent into quarantine.

Dr Albert Au of the Centre for Health Protection said the woman received the BioNTech vaccine on Monday last week, and started to have a sore throat and lost her sense of taste a few days later.

He said at first she thought the symptoms were side effects of the vaccine.

Au said the woman visited the fitness centre seven times before and after she developed symptoms. He said although she had worn masks during the classes, there was still a risk of virus transmission.

The doctor said more time would be needed to see whether further infections emerge from the gym.

“If there are other cases arising from this gym, that means there’s an outbreak. We will implement more stringent measures, for example, requiring all the attendees to be quarantined just like the Ursus cluster,” he said.

A recent Covid outbreak at Ursus Fitness in Sai Ying Pun saw more than 150 people contracting the virus.

The latest patient is a flight attendant, but she hasn’t worked since November last year. She lives in a partitioned flat in Causeway Bay. Some of her neighbours were also being put in quarantine.

The woman accounted for the only untraceable coronavirus case on Friday.

The centre reported 11 new coronavirus infections in total, three of which were locally acquired.

Eight imported cases involved people flying in from the Philippines, Indonesia and Pakistan.