By The SUN
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| The Tai Po building was first locked down after the index patient tested positive Friday |
Residents of around 20
flats in Mei Sun building in Tai Po will be sent to a quarantine centre after a
woman who lives five floors above a flat where three people found infected with
Covid-19 earlier tested preliminary positive on Sunday, Jan 9.
The housing block was also put under a second lockdown Sunday night, amid fears the highly contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus has spread among residents there.
Health officials who inspected the building earlier in the day said the 66-year-old woman who lives alone in unit 10D has tested positive after an Indonesian helper, her employer and a teenage girl who live in 5D came down with Covid-19.
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The authorities fear the virus spread through the building because of the altered pipes in the tenth floor unit.
Microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung said the contamination may have been due to what is known as the chimney effect, where warm air rises in a pipe, as what happened with the waste water pipe in this case.
“The air reached unit 10D, where the washroom had been altered and the shower had not been used and hence the u-shaped trap in the drainage pipe was probably dry. So... the [contaminated] air entered the unit and infected this lady,” he said.
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Dr Edwin Tsui, head of the Centre for Health
Protection, said all unit D residents from the sixth to the 24th floors of the
block would be taken into quarantine as soon as possible, while other residents
would be tested during a lockdown on Sunday night.
The patient reportedly tested negative when the building was locked down on Thursday, but another test on Saturday came back positive.
Also among the preliminary positive cases was that of another guest at the birthday party in Wanchai of a delegate to the National People’s Congress, and an unlinked case involving a 20-year-old unvaccinated woman working parttime at SOGO department store in Causeway Bay.
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At the regular CHP briefing today, Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the communicable diseases branch, said the saleslady last reported for work in SOGO on Dec 28, and had also worked at her family’s pharmacy in H.A.N.D.S shopping mall in Tuen Mun.
The woman lives in Tower 8 of the Aegean Coast
residential development in Tuen Mun.
Chuang identified the second woman as a
43-year-old uninvited guest to NPC delegate Witman Hung's birthday party last
Monday. She lives in Tower 2 of Harbour Green in Tai Kok Tsui.
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She said the woman who works at Cable TV Tower in
Tsuen Wan was not on Hung’s guest list but went there after 9:30am, along with
the 37-year-old woman who was the first confirmed patient from the gathering.
"[This woman] actually went with [the index case] ... and also they had drinks and snacks together before they went to the party," said Chuang.
She said the second woman got the infection from the first patient either from sharing drinks and snacks, or during the party.
But either way, she said the CHP’s classification of close contacts at the party was still valid.
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What she was more concerned about now, said Chuang, was that there appeared to be around 190 guests at the party, instead of the previous estimate of 180 or so. This meant that there were guests that remained unaccounted for, and were not tested.
The buildings where the two preliminary positive cases live were also put under lockdown tonight.
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| Chuang says the guests at the Wanchai party who are unaccounted for must step forward |
Chuang reported 33 additional confirmed cases of Covid-19 Sunday, taking Hong Kong’s total tally to 12,935.
The new cases consist of 27 classified as imported, five linked to imported cases and one possibly import-related, involving a woman who works as an airplane cleaner at HK airport.
Thirty of the cases involved mutant strains, two test results were pending, while the viral load of the remaining patient was insufficient for mutation test.
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The patients were made up of 17 males and 16 females, aged 11 months to 71 years old.
The five cases linked to a previous infection included the 42-year-old female employer of the Indonesian helper, as well as her 13-year-old daughter; a three-year-old boy who had breakfast at Six Garden restaurant in Tai Hang at the same time as a previously reported infection, a 71-year-old woman who visited the North Point workplace of two earlier confirmed patients and a three-year-old family member of an aircrew who tested positive earlier.
Meanwhile, genome sequencing analysis by the Department of Health’s public laboratory uncovered 20 additional Omicron cases, raising the total number found in Hong Kong to 265.
Two passenger flights which both arrived on Jan 7 were also suspended from flying to Hong Kong for the next two weeks. These are flight SQ007 operated by Singapore Airlines from San Francisco, USA, which had eight passengers who tested positive on arrival, and NH811 operated by All Nippon Airways from Tokyo Japan which carried six infected passengers.
The other imported cases flew in from Canada and the US, India and Saudi Arabia via Qatar, Argentina via Germany, Italy, Denmark and Maldives via Qatar, United Kingdom via Thailand, Canada via Japan, and Philippines via Japan involving a foreign domestic helper.
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