A news release: CHP of DH strives to contribute to global fight against COVID-19. Excerpt:
The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) of the Department of Health (DH) has been participating in the global fight against COVID-19 and strives to make a contribution by sharing with the international community Hong Kong's efforts in combating the pandemic, especially in response to the emergence of variant strains and timely reporting of findings on variants.
The CHP has conducted a review on the epidemiology of confirmed COVID-19 variant cases reported in Hong Kong from December 2020 to June 2021 and public health control measures relating to COVID-19 variants. The findings have been released as a pre-print pending formal publication in IJID Regions, an official journal of the International Society for Infectious Diseases (doi.org/10.1016/j.ijregi.2021.11.002).
Among the 5 609 confirmed COVID-19 cases reported between December 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021, a total of 393 cases were found to be variant cases (7.0 per cent), including 291 cases of Variants of Concern (74 per cent), 73 cases of Variants of Interest (18.6 per cent) and 29 cases of Alerts for Further Monitoring (7.4 per cent).
The above epidemiological review has found that, unlike some places which saw surges of COVID-19 variants following their introduction, no widespread community outbreak of variant cases was observed in Hong Kong and sustained local transmission of COVID variants was absent. Among the 393 variant cases reported in the period under review, the vast majority of them were imported cases. Only three clusters involving local transmission of COVID-19 variants were identified, with two clusters linked to imported cases (first cases 11643 and 11902 respectively) while the source of the remaining cluster was unknown (first case 11852). Nearly half of the cases in these three clusters were identified during quarantine in quarantine centre. Further community spread was successfully contained.
This success was found to be attributed to the strengthening of public health control measures against variants at various stages, including risk-stratified quarantine and testing requirements for inbound travellers, banning of flights from extremely high-risk areas, enhanced contact tracing and quarantine to 21 days, extensive community testing and enhanced laboratory surveillance.
Hong Kong's control strategy has successfully limited the spread of COVID-19 variants from imported cases and prevented the occurrence of community-wide outbreaks, a spokesman for the CHP said.
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