Chief Executive Carrie Lam on Wednesday announced a slew of measures — including converting more wards in public hospitals for COVID-19 use — to boost the number of beds for patients with the coronavirus by around 16,000.
This comes as Hong Kong continues to grapple with a COVID-19 outbreak, which has infected more than half a million people.
The measures include converting 50 percent of general inpatient beds in public hospitals for patients of the coronavirus. Lam said this will generate close to 9,000 beds for COVID-19 patients.
To make that happen, she said she hoped private hospitals can take in some of the patients in public hospitals.
Lam — who made a rare appearance with a mask on at a press conference — also said the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Jordan will be turned into a designated facility for the treatment of coronavirus infections.
Over the next four days, non-COVID-19 patients in the hospital will be transferred to other hospitals or discharged.
The Hospital Authority noted that around 250 would need to be transferred to other hospitals, while around 130 would be discharged as they were recovering.
The Jordan hospital will not take in non-COVID-19 patients from Wednesday, except those in critical condition.
The authority estimated the facility would be able to take in 1,500 COVID-19 patients.
Lam also said that a 1,000-bed makeshift hospital at the Lok Ma Chau Loop is expected to begin operations in phases in April.
“These measures can greatly increase the public hospital’s [capacity] to attend to COVID-19 patients so as to ensure they will not become patients with severe symptoms because of the lack of timely treatment,” she said.
The chief executive also said the Hong Kong government had requested mainland authorities to provide healthcare staff to help with operations at North Lantau Hospital Hong Kong Infection Control Centre and the AsiaWorld-Expo’s community treatment facility.
She added that authorities were targeting to have all elderly in residential homes to get vaccinated before March 18.
But the city’s leader was mum about when a mandatory COVID-19 universal testing exercise will begin.
Medical experts earlier questioned the plan to conduct mass testing in March, with Hong Kong not having sufficient facilities to isolate infected people.
Mixed messages about the exercise and a possible lockdown also sparked a round of panic buying among residents.
Lam said officials were still planning and preparing for the mass testing, but it was “not a priority to do it now”. She added she would take into consideration experts’ opinions.
The city reported 58,757 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday.
A total of 25,991 were found via PCR tests conducted by public and private laboratories. All but seven are local infections.
Authorities were notified of the remaining 32,766 via an online platform for residents to report positive results of self-administered rapid antigen tests.
Albert Au, the Centre for Health Protection’s principal medical and health officer, noted that around 9,700 of these cases did the rapid antigen test on Sunday, but they were included in Tuesday’s figure because the platform was only launched on Monday and ran for a shorter period.
The city recorded 291 new deaths, aged 41 to 105.
