Hong Kong will require electronic tracking wristbands for isolated people in the home and will incorporate a Chinese-style electronic health code system as part of new measures to curb the spread of coronavirus.
Quarantine bracelets, which will be introduced on Friday, will be mandatory for people who have tested positive and are quarantined at home to make sure they do not leave the building during their period of isolation.
“We need to make sure the insulation of the home is more accurate while it is human,” said Lo Chung-mau, the city’s new health secretary, who announced the new requirement on Monday. Failure to comply with a mandatory quarantine order in Hong Kong carries a fine of up to HK $ 25,000 ($ 3,200) and up to six months in prison.
Hong Kong has previously used two types of bracelets to track people in quarantine at home at the start of the pandemic in 2020: a plastic wristband with a QR code and a wristband with a bulky electronic tracker. He did not clarify which will be presented on Friday.
With the health code system, which tracks the movement of people via mobile phones, citizens will be able to access public spaces if the QR code of their account is green. The code turns yellow if people have been in close contact with an infected person and red if the person has tested positive for the virus.
According to the Hong Kong Health Code, arriving travelers will also be marked with “yellow,” Lo said in his ad.
People with red and yellow codes will not be able to access “high-risk” places, such as hospitals and care centers for the elderly, and will not be able to participate in high-risk activities, including removing masks.
The new system will be deployed in the “Leave Home Safe” app introduced last year in public spaces to track people’s movement.
Human rights organizations have criticized China’s health code system as an invasion of privacy, warning that Beijing uses the data collected in the system to control and restrict freedoms.
Local experts warn that Hong Kong’s health codes and bracelets can have the unintended consequence of involving people in not reporting positive test results for fear of major disruptions in their lives.
While the measures may have a “marginal impact” on slowing the spread of the community, “the impact that is most worrying is the impact on testing and reporting,” said Ben Cowling, a tenured professor at epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. .
Hong Kong reports an average of about 2,500 cases a day, but future statistics may not fully reflect the reality of the situation. “It may be in a week or two, it’s lower, not because the transmission has gone down, but because people don’t report,” Cowling said.
Hong Kong’s new measures indicate that the city is unlikely to give in in its attempt to cancel all Covid-19 transmission, although other countries have continued to relax measures in light of vaccination rates. higher, as well as economic and social pressures.
“Most other parts of the world are going in the direction of not controlling transmission, but minimizing serious cases,” Cowling said.
“This would be what we might think of as an exit from the pandemic modality, but the introduction of these measures, in any case, goes in another direction, towards stricter control, even though we have a higher vaccine coverage. and availability of antiviral drugs now “.
The new measures follow hopes that the city will continue to ease restrictions, after last Thursday the city suspended its Covid flight suspension mechanism. Hong Kong still maintains strict travel restrictions, imposing a seven-day hotel quarantine for arrivals, in line with China’s “zero-Covid” policy that aims to eradicate the virus from the community.