Another bar in Hong Kong’s Central District has become the site of a COVID-19 outbreak as the city reported 489 daily cases on Thursday.
Located along Pottinger Street, LINQ is the third bar to see a cluster of coronavirus infections after drinking venues were allowed to reopen two weeks ago.
The Centre for Health Protection said it found 18 infected people linked to the bar, who were customers who went there last Friday or Saturday or both days.
One of the customers had also visited The Iron Fairies, another bar that has an outbreak.
Meanwhile, two other bars with a cluster of COVID-19 cases each saw two more infections.
This brings the total number of recent cases linked to The Iron Fairies to 51 and Zentral to 33.
Of the 489 new cases in the city on Thursday, 65 were imported.
A total of 170 of them were detected via PCR testing, while 319 were from the reporting of self-administered rapid antigen tests (RAT).
The percentage of self-reported positive cases that were later found to be negative via PCR testing was 21 percent on Monday, the center noted.
This comes after the center said it was possible that some members of the public were making false reporting or attempting to mislead authorities by using old test results so as to fulfill the requirements of the third stage of the city’s vaccine pass, which was launched on Tuesday.
Police have so far arrested three people in relation to the investigations.
Chuang Shuk-kwan, the center’s head of the communicable disease branch, urged the public not to do so as it is illegal and they could be fined or imprisoned.
The center also reported 40 infections in schools, involving 34 institutions. A total of 28 are students and 12 are staff members.
A cluster of six – one teacher and five students – is linked to a jazz dance class at Holy Trinity College in Shek Kip Mei.
The center noted that the students were wearing their masks while dancing, but did take off the mask to drink water.
Meanwhile, the city reported another death on Thursday, involving a 64-year-old woman.
She was a chronically ill patient and had undergone a heart valve surgery. She had received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.
