HK to ease rules for those who are vaccinated

Mounting pressure on people's livelihoods and the city's economy has prompted Hong Kong officials to lay out a plan that ties vaccination to the easing of social distancing measures in order to get the city back on track.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam, together with her ministers, yesterday outlined at a briefing the ways in which measures could be relaxed in phases from as early as April 29 for businesses including eateries, bars and pubs.

"We are making use of vaccination as the basis for adjusting social distancing measures, as well as border control measures," she said. "We are not adopting a herd immunity concept for adjusting the relaxation measures. We are just targeting individuals or a group of individuals."

In the food and beverage sector, up to 12 patrons a table may be allowed if the staff and customers are fully vaccinated, which means they have had two doses of the vaccines as required and waited 14 days for antibodies to develop. Dine-in services at these places may be extended to 2am from 10pm now.

Where staff are fully vaccinated, an area could be carved out in the eatery for patrons who have had their first dose of the vaccine.

Each table at such places can seat up to eight patrons, with dine-in services extended to 2am. The number is "massively increased" to 100 people for banquets under the same conditions.

For venues including bars, pubs, mahjong parlours and party rooms, which have been forced to shut for four months, Mrs Lam said "details will be discussed with the trade" on how they can resume operations, depending on the scale of vaccination.

Mandatory quarantine for visitors from low-risk areas such as Singapore, Australia and New Zealand was on April 9 shortened to 14 days with an additional seven-day self-monitoring period. But this could be shortened further to a seven-day quarantine in total or lower for those from low-risk countries who are fully vaccinated.

Officials said visits to eldercare homes will be allowed again if relatives are fully vaccinated and take the antigen rapid tests for Covid-19. Those who cannot be vaccinated will have to produce a negative result from a nucleic test in place of the inoculation requirement.

As at Sunday night, more than 830,000 doses of the Sinovac and Pfizer-BioNTech jabs had been administered since the voluntary vaccination drive began in end-February. "We would like to see the vaccination rate go up. That means at the moment it's not satisfactory, especially as we consider that we do have a sufficient supply of vaccines," said Mrs Lam.

She noted that the government has been able to suppress the outbreaks in the fourth wave of the pandemic, adding that in the past three days, there have not been any untraceable infections in the city.

Hong Kong recorded 13 new cases yesterday, of which two are local infections and 11 are imported. This brings the city's total to more than 11,500 cases and 207 deaths.

Existing measures including mask-wearing, a cap of four on public gatherings and dine-in services only till 10pm will be extended for another two weeks to April 28. They were due to expire tomorrow.

The extension is needed to allow officials to monitor the situation after the long Easter break which saw an increase in social activities.

Meanwhile, talks to resume the Singapore-Hong Kong travel bubble are under way. The city had earlier proposed that passengers on these direct flights be fully vaccinated.

Correction note: An earlier version of this article said that the mandatory quarantine for fully vaccinated visitors from low-risk areas such as Singapore, Australia and New Zealand was shortened to 14 days on April 9. This has been corrected. We are sorry for the error.