The Hong Kong administration is tightening quarantine measures: all entertainment venues in the city will be closed and groups of more than two people will be prohibited from gathering in public places. This was announced by the head of Hong Kong Carrie Lam, according to the South China Morning Post.
Lam said that shopping and entertainment centers, amusement parks, karaoke and swimming pools will be closed in the city from Wednesday. Gyms and beauty salons will remain open if the group rule of no more than two is followed. The same rule is introduced for restaurants, which, moreover, will have to close no later than 10 pm.
For violation of these measures, fines will be increased – they will amount to 2 thousand Hong Kong dollars (about 250 US dollars, or 19 thousand rubles). It is reported that such decisions were led by a new outbreak of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2: over the past day, 76 new cases of the disease were found in the city, nine of them could not be traced to foreign vectors and were considered “local”.
“The numbers on Monday decreased slightly, but I do not want people to mistakenly conclude that we have passed the peak of the epidemic,” the publication quotes the words of the head of the Hong Kong administration. In the same speech, she said that most of the civil servants, of whom there are more than 177,000 in the city, are transferred to a remote mode of work.
According to the Johns Hopkins Institute, over 6.3 thousand cases of the disease and 109 deaths have been recorded in Hong Kong during the entire pandemic.