Hong Kong authorities are hoping to move all COVID-19 patients waiting for admission outdoors into hospital buildings by the end of Friday as a cold spell hits the city.
Sara Ho, the Hospital Authority’s chief manager (patient safety and risk management), said at a press conference on Friday that hospitals had begun freeing indoor spaces, including staff areas, general outpatient clinic areas and corridors, for patients waiting outside to move into.
“This is very difficult, because it is already very congested inside hospitals, but we are even more worried about the patients waiting outdoors, especially because it is getting colder these few days,” she said.
Ho said that hospitals also started discharging patients in stable condition to community isolation facilities, such as the ones in AsiaWorld-Expo and Penny’s Bay, to free more hospital spaces for patients in greater need.
With the city’s public hospitals reaching full capacity, many such patients — including the elderly — can be seen waiting outside these hospital buildings the past few days.
A medical professional said on a radio show on Friday that some senior citizens and children were showing signs of hypothermia while waiting at these outdoor spaces.
Meanwhile, the Centre for Health Protection reported 3,629 new cases, with all but two locally transmitted.
However, Chuang Shuk-kwan, the center’s head of the communicable disease branch, said that as of Thursday, there was a backlog of 4,800 specimens from the past few days to be tested at the Department of Health’s laboratories. She added that staff were busy testing these specimens.
She also said that the discrepancy in Friday’s numbers with the preliminary figure a day before was due to a lag time in transporting specimens from private labs to the department.
The center also recorded 7,600 preliminary infections.
Ho said that as of Thursday midnight, 10 people have died from the coronavirus in the past 24 hours, including eight that were earlier announced in a press release on Thursday.
The two new deaths are a 62-year-old man and a 96-year-old woman. They were both suffering from chronic illness.
