Coronavirus: Hong Kong will seek to ramp up testing capacity to 200,000 per day amid growing outbreak

Hong Kong aims to ramp up its coronavirus testing capacity to 200,000 per day amid an uptick of Delta and Omicron cases towards the end of the Lunar New Year holiday, a senior official has said.

The disclosure came as a source told the Post that more than 130 cases were expected to be confirmed on Friday, of which only two were imported.

Secretary for the Civil Service Patrick Nip Tak-kuen said the Omicron strain was spreading rapidly, and the rising number of untraceable cases meant that even stepped-up contact tracing efforts might not be enough to cope.

“The current epidemic situation is very severe, and it is moving towards a worsening trend as cases rise,” Nip told a radio show. “With more than a hundred untraceable cases at the moment, it could mean there are some 200 unknown transmission chains in the community.”

Currently, contractors process an average of some 100,000 nucleic acid tests every day in Hong Kong. More than 3.5 million coronavirus tests were conducted across the city over the past month, according to the official statistics.

“We have increased the testing capacity to about 170,000 to 180,000 a day, and we hope the number of tests will increase to 200,000 per day soon,” Nip said.

City leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said earlier that she would not rule out seeking help from the mainland in ramping up testing capacity if necessary.

Hong Kong has been facing a growing wave of coronavirus infections since late December, with the daily caseload in triple digits over the last three days, and the number of local unlinked infections reaching 167 as of Thursday.