Health officials this afternoon announced three more confirmed cases of COVID-19, all linked to previous infections, taking the total tally in the city to 84.
Dr. Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the Center for Health Protection’s Communicable Disease Branch, said the 82nd case involved a 33-year-old station officer at the Mong Kok East MTR station who is the son of the city’s 72nd confirmed patient.
The man was absent from work since Feb. 20 after developing symptoms including fever and fatigue, and has been treated at United Christian Hospital in Kwun Tong since Feb. 22. He was told to undergo quarantine at home on Sunday after his father was confirmed to have contracted the illness.
The second new case is a 55-year-old woman who lives in a private housing complex in North Point and works at a KFC outlet in the same neighborhood. She developed a cough on Feb. 17 and was admitted to Ruttonjee Hospital in Wan Chai on Feb. 24.
KFC said in a statement that it has thoroughly disinfected the branch in question and has thrown away all the food. The outlet will not be open again until March 9, and other staff members there, who have not shown any symptoms so far, have been asked to quarantine themselves at home for 14 days.
The woman had recently visited the Fook Wai Ching She Buddhist temple in North Point, where a cluster of cases have emerged. She is also the sister, of the city’s 75th confirmed case, who had also visited the temple.
So far, a total of seven confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been linked to the North Point temple.
Chuang said that 153 people who had visited the temple had so far called the Center for Health Protection hotline, 22 of whom have been put under quarantine. CHP staff members collected 33 environmental samples from the building where the temple is located, with two of them — collected on the surface of buddhist booklets and a water tap in a washroom — testing positive for the new virus.
The third new case is a 24-year-old man who is the son of another confirmed patient. Both he and his mother live in the same housing complex as the infected KFC employee.
Despite showing no symptoms of coronavirus, he was advised to take a lung CT scan while visiting his mother at the hospital, and ended up testing positive for coronavirus. The man is currently being treated at Ruttonjee Hospital in Wan Chai.
