Portugal on Hong Kong’s list of high risk countries
Non-Hong Kong residents, who have been in those countries for more than 21 days, cannot enter the Chinese Special Administrative Region, indicated the executive led by Carrie Lam.
Residents returning from group A countries must be fully vaccinated and comply with a mandatory 21-day quarantine at a hotel designated by the authorities, added.
Group A now includes 48 countries, such as Angola, Brazil, Mozambique, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, although some have not yet registered any cases with the Omicron variant, according to the Hong Kong government.
Those arriving from countries that have identified a local transmission with an Omicron variant, or from “imported” cases from Hong Kong, have to complete the first seven days at the Penny Bay quarantine center.
On Monday, Portugal detected 13 cases of the Omicron variant in a football club and, on the same day, Sweden registered a first case, while Japan counted a case of the Omicron variant, on Tuesday, which it took as authorities of Hong Kong to join the three nations to the group A of high risk countries for covid-19, starting Friday.
The Hong Kong government, where three Omicron infections have been detected so far, said health policies are “for now” appropriate as knowledge is not yet certain about this variant.
“We will follow the studies to see how this variant affects people”, indicated a secretary for Food and Health, Sophia Chan, in statements to a local broadcaster.
Since the start of the pandemic, Hon Kong has recorded 213 deaths and 12,437 covid-19 cases. The vaccination rate is currently around 70%.
Covid-19 has caused at least 5,206,370 deaths worldwide, among more than 261.49 million infections with the new coronavirus registered since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the latest report by the Agence France-Presse.
In Portugal, since March 2020, 18,441 people have died and 1,147,249 cases of infection have been recorded, according to data from the General Directorate of Health.
The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently with variants identified in several countries.
A new variant, an Omicron, was recently detected in South Africa, and 13 cases of this new strain have been identified so far in Portugal.
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