The quarantine bracelets, which will go into circulation on Friday, will be mandatory for people who have tested positive and are in home quarantine to ensure they do not leave the building during their isolation period. “We need to make sure home isolation is more accurate while being humane,” said Loh Chung-mau, the city’s new health secretary, announcing the new requirement on Monday. Violating the mandatory quarantine order in Hong Kong carries a fine of up to HK$25,000 ($3,200) and up to six months in jail. Hong Kong previously used two types of wristbands to track people under home quarantine at the start of the pandemic in 2020: an earlier plastic wristband with a QR code and a later one with a bulky electronic tracker. Law did not specify which of those will be presented on Friday. Under the health code system, which tracks people’s movement via mobile phones, citizens will be allowed to enter public spaces if the QR code on 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. In accordance with Hong Kong’s health code, arriving travelers will also be flagged in “yellow,” Lo said in a statement. People in code red and yellow will not be allowed into “high-risk” areas, such as hospitals and aged care facilities, and cannot participate in high-risk activities, including removing masks. The new system will roll out to the ‘Leave Home Safe’ app that was introduced last year in public places to track people’s movements. Human rights monitors have criticized China’s health code system as an invasion of privacy, warning that Beijing is using data collected in the system to control and restrict freedoms. Local experts warn that Hong Kong’s health codes and bracelets may have the unintended consequence of tricking people into not reporting positive test results for fear of major disruptions in their lives. While the measures may have a “marginal impact” on reducing community spread, “the impact that is most concerning is the impact on testing and reporting,” said Ben Cowling, chair professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health. Hong Kong. . Hong Kong reports an average of about 2,500 cases per day, but future statistics may not fully reflect the reality of the situation. “It could be in a week or two, it’s lower, not because transmission has gone down, but because people aren’t reporting,” Cowling said. Hong Kong’s new measures signal the city is unlikely to back down in its bid to stamp out all Covid-19 transmission, even as other countries have continued to ease measures in light of higher vaccination rates 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. “We would think of this as an exit from the pandemic situation, but the introduction of these measures, if anything, goes in the other direction, back to tighter control, even though we have higher vaccine coverage and availability of antiviral drugs now.” The new measures follow hopes that the city can continue to ease restrictions after the city put the Covid flight suspension mechanism on hold last Thursday. Hong Kong still maintains strict travel restrictions, imposing a seven-day hotel quarantine on arrivals, in line with China’s “zero Covid” policy aimed at eradicating the virus in the community.
