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| Three Filipinas tested positive at HK Airport in the past few days |
A Filipina, likely a domestic worker who just flew in from Manila, has
tested positive for the coronavirus at Hong Kong airport, raising the city’s
tally as of Jun 20 to 1,128.
She is the third Filipina to be found infected on arrival from the Philippines this week.
There was no new local case for the seventh day running, but one patient
died from virus- related ailments, raising the death toll to five. Before this,
the fatality rate had remained steady at four for several months.
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The fatality is a 78-year-old woman who was among the nine residents of
Luk Chuen House in Lek Yuen estate, Shatin, who tested positive for Covid-19
early this month.
She was a next-door neighbor of the 34-year-old woman who was the first
to be diagnosed with the disease in the cluster.
Reports quoted a spokesperson for the
Prince of Wales Hospital as saying that the elderly woman died at 5.33pm, after
being in critical condition since Jun 8. She was in stable condition when
admitted, but later deteriorated.
Various treatments were introduced to save the patient,
including intubation, renal replacement therapy and mechanical ventilation to
assist her breathing, to no avail. A therapy called inotropic infusion, which is
meant to stimulate her weakened heart to pump harder, also failed.
Experts
are still trying to find out how the virus spread in Luk Chuen House, and seem
to have affected only residents of flats numbered 12 and 10. No fault was seen
in the building’s sewage pipes, so the focus has shifted to the flats’
ventilation system.
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| HK's 5th fatality lived in a Shatin estate building where 8 other people were found infected |
Three
other patients with links to the index patient in the cluster were also found
infected. They include the woman’s two colleagues at a food factory in Kwai
Chung, and an ambulanceman who took her to Prince of Wales Hospital.
Meanwhile,
the Filipina listed as the latest Covid-19 case is described in the Centre for
Heath Protection records as a 40-year-old woman who lived in the Philippines previously.
She
arrived in Hong Kong on Jun 19, and had a slight headache. Swab samples taken
from her at the airport showed she was infected, so she was taken to Princess
Margaret Hospital in Kowloon for isolation and treatment.
In
about 10 similar cases of new arrivals from Manila, the patients were
asymptomatic, or had no symptoms at all.
Also
on Saturday, a special flight carrying Hong Kong
residents stranded in Chennai, India, arrived in the city in the afternoon. It
was the second repatriation from the South Asian country in the past week, which
altogether brought back 280 residents.
More public leisure facilities that had been closed for nearly
six months have also reopened, including outdoor soccer pitches, and some
basketball and volleyball courts. Earlier, public swimming pools and tennis
courts were allowed to reopen.
The past week also saw the reopening of top tourist attractions,
Ocean Park and Hong Kong Disneyland. Both were closed on Jan 26, two days after
the city recorded its first coronavirus case, that of a man from Wuhan in
Central China, who was stopped at the West Rail Train station after being
detected to have a fever.
