How new Covid-19 variant might have spread in HK hotel

HONG KONG • Two cases of the new Covid-19 strain raising alarm in parts of southern Africa and unnerving financial markets worldwide have been found in travellers in compulsory quarantine in Hong Kong.

A traveller from South Africa was found to have the variant - currently known as B.1.1.529 - while the other case was identified in a person who had travelled from Canada and was quarantined in the hotel room opposite his, the Hong Kong government said late on Thursday.

The traveller from South Africa used a mask with a valve that does not filter exhaled air and may have transmitted the virus to his neighbour when the hotel room door was open, a health department spokesman said yesterday.

B.1.1.529 carries an unusually large number of mutations and is "clearly very different" from previous incarnations, Dr Tulio de Oliveira, a bio-informatics professor who runs gene-sequencing institutions at two South African universities, said on Thursday.

Early polymerase chain reaction test results showed that 90 per cent of 1,100 new infections in the South African province that includes Johannesburg were caused by the new variant, Dr de Oliveira tweeted.

In Botswana - which neighbours South Africa - the new variant has been detected in vaccinated people, Dr Kereng Masupu, coordinator of the Presidential Covid-19 Task Force, said in a statement.

Twelve people who were staying in rooms close to the two Hong Kong cases are now undergoing compulsory 14-day quarantines at a government facility, according to the statement out on Thursday.

Hong Kong is one of the few places in the world that have yet to have a recorded community outbreak of Delta, the more contagious variant that has now become the dominant strain worldwide.

Delta has forced some countries which were able to keep Covid-19 out through quarantines and border curbs last year to abandon that approach, instead pivoting to treating the virus as endemic.

The cases of the new variant may prompt Hong Kong to tighten what is already one of the toughest quarantine regimes in the world, with travellers from some places isolated in hotels for up to 21 days.

The presence of the new variant may complicate efforts to reopen the border between Hong Kong and mainland China.

For months, Hong Kong officials have said that resuming quarantine-free travel between the Chinese territory and the mainland - virtually the only places in the world still pursuing a containment strategy that seeks full eradication of the virus - is their top priority, even though the strategy has damaged the city's reputation as a global finance hub.

Dr David Hui, a professor of respiratory medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a member of the city's Covid-19 advisory panel, told local radio yesterday that Hong Kong should ban all returnees from Africa because of the variant, according to The Standard.

The city banned the use of masks with exhalation valves or vents in hotel quarantine this week because of the variant case situation. Such masks do not effectively filter exhaled air, the government said.

Hong Kong also required air purifiers to be installed in hotel quarantine rooms if the guest intends to exercise with a stepper, exercise bike, walking pad or treadmill to "remove aerosol generated", during such activities, according to a government statement.

Other countries such as Australia have seen cases of Covid-19 transmit in the quarantine environment, fuelling criticism that hotels are not adequate locations for isolating travellers and suspected cases.

BLOOMBERG, NYTIMES