Hong Kong Health Secretary Sophia Chan announced on Wednesday that the city plans to ease coronavirus restrictions from February 18th onwards. This will see the reopening of sports and entertainment facilities as well as the extension of dining hours in restaurants.
While catering businesses will be permitted to remain open until 10 PM, beauty salons, theme parks, and cinemas will be allowed to reopen with certain restrictions in place. This comes as Hong Kong sees a drastic drop in COVID-19 cases affecting the city. During a news conference, Chan expressed her confidence in the city’s ability to overcome the ongoing pandemic. Currently, new cases hover around 30 per day.
Currently. the Asian financial hub is awaiting the arrival of one million BioNTech vaccine doses, which are expected to arrive sometime in mid-February. With less than 30% of its residents expressing a willingness to accept the Chinese-produced Sinovac vaccine, Hong Kong’s vaccination program differs markedly from those of other developed cities and mainland China.
So far, Hong Kong has secured 22.5 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from a multitude of suppliers, including Fosun Pharma-BioNTech, Sinovac, and Oxford-AstraZeneca.
