HONG KONG (BLOOMBERG) - The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it mistakenly flagged Hong Kong as a growing risk for coronavirus when it raised its travel warnings for the city and Singapore earlier this week.
Hong Kong's increase was done unintentionally, the agency said on Tuesday (Sept 28).
The city's status has returned to Level 1, indicating a low risk, on the CDC's website, a spokesman said. The level is the lowest of the agency's four-tiered travel health notice system.
Singapore remains at a Level 3 after its risk rating was raised this week by the CDC amid the largest outbreak the South-east Asian city-state has experienced since the pandemic began. Anyone who has not been vaccinated should avoid non-essential trips to Singapore given its "high level" of Covid-19, according to the agency.
"All travellers may be at risk for getting and spreading Covid-19 variants," the agency said when it increased its travel advice for Singapore by one notch to Level 3. The CDC's highest travel health notice is Level 4.
The CDC's decision to boost Hong Kong to Level 2 was immediately perplexing. The rating is given to locations with a "moderate level" of coronavirus. It includes a recommendation that non-essential travel to the area be avoided by anyone who is unvaccinated and has a higher risk of severe illness from Covid-19.
But while Singapore has reported almost daily caseloads of more than 1,000 since mid-September, Hong Kong has seen fewer than 10 cases almost every day since late August. There has not been a locally transmitted infection in Hong Kong since mid-August, data shows, and it has yet to experience an outbreak of the Delta variant.
The United States, by contrast, is in the midst of another Covid-19 resurgence as its vaccination roll-out stalls. The country added almost 117,966 cases on Monday, and saw more than 2,000 deaths from the virus.
The primary criteria for determining CDC travel health notices for destinations as large as Hong Kong and Singapore are the number of recent cases and the trajectory of new cases, according to the CDC's website.
The threshold for Level 2, for example, is 50 to 99 new cases over the past 28 days, for every 100,000 local residents. The Level 3 threshold is 100 to 500, the website said.
Testing data is also assessed, according to the CDC, but there is room for less-explicit factors to play a role, too. "Additional information such as hospitalisations and imported case counts may be considered when inconsistencies or other concerns are reported," the CDC site said.
