Health: Hong Kong allows Covid home testing as daily cases soar – Gulf Digital News

Health: Hong Kong allows Covid home testing as daily cases soar – Gulf Digital News

Hong Kong health authorities said on Saturday they would adjust Covid testing procedures to allow some people to test from home to ease long queues at designated testing centers, as the city's outbreak proves increasingly hard to control.

Health secretary Sophia Chan said a record 17,063 new Covid-19 daily cases had been recorded, and 66 deaths in the past 24-hours in the city of 7.4 million.

"We're in a very dire situation," she told reporters.

"The scale of the outbreak is unprecedented and the peak is yet to arrive," she added, with some experts predicting up to 180,000 cases daily in March.

Chan said some 1.3 million rapid testing kits would be handed out to those in higher risk areas and jobs, and people testing positive would have to register their results online.

Authorities also said they would allow some children testing positive for Covid-19 to remain at home, rather than being separated from their parents and hospitalised, after a public outcry from families across the city.

Some Hong Kong families had despaired over strict Covid rules that saw even toddlers in some cases taken away from their parents and isolated, prompting some families to leave the city.

The rapid testing kits will "remove long queues