HOTEL operators in Hong Kong will be requested to provide up to 10,000 rooms to help relieve pressure on the region’s hospitals as a fifth wave of coronavirus cases soar.
Representatives of the sector are meeting senior government officials today. It is understood they will be offered “wholesale plan” drawn up by the government to house asymptomatic patients elsewhere besides hospitals or at home.
Individual properties have already signed up to provide quarantine for Hong Kong residents returning to the city, but now officials want hoteliers to play their part in relieving the pressure on hospital beds which are reaching capacity levels.
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The plan forms part of a strategy to contain and eradicate the Omicron variant of Covid – an approach which is coming under increasing criticism in Hong Kong, but at the same time aligns with a “dynamic zero-Covid” policy pushed by officials in mainland China.
Asymptomatic patients will also be housed in newly built public housing unit and temporary medical centres under the plans, the South China Morning Post reported a government policymaking source as saying. The commissioning of 400 taxis to ferry the patients to the new isolation facilities is also planned
Chief Executive Carrie Lam unveiled the plans yesterday (Tuesday) as Covid cases rose to more than a thousand a day. Ministers also met at the weekend with mainland China officials to discuss ways of strengthening Hong Kong’s protection against the pandemic.
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Some 44 hotels in the city are used for quarantine, but media reports say health officials are proposing that these become isolation facilities. Health experts are estimating more than 5,000 cases a day by mid-March.
The Chief Executive has legal powers to request the cooperation of the hotel sector but said she hoped industry representatives would willingly sign up to the scheme aimed at providing 13,000 extra isolation spaces overall.
“My target is to get them to agree to a plan,” Lam told a press conference on Monday. “It’s not individual negotiations, which has been the modus operandi previously that we approached individual hotels one by one and to discuss the conditions with them one by one – that’s not efficient anymore.
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“So we will do a wholesale plan and require them to sign on the plan, so as to deliver a few thousand, up to 10,000 of the rooms within a very short period,” Lam was quoted by The Standard newspaper as saying.
“I do not want to use my power, but I do have power under Cap 599 to make a regulation to ask for their cooperation. I don’t want to do that, I want to go down a cooperation model, in order to find more hotel rooms for the community isolation purposes.”
Concerns have been voiced about how hotels operating under the scheme would adjust to the new role with staff having to wear PPE and other precautions such as ventilation.
Over the past two years hotels in Hong Kong have created staycations and tourist quarantine packages but these new revenue streams have been hit by tougher restrictions including banning of flights from eight countries with the threat of the Omicron variant.
Girish Jhunjhnuwala, CEO of hotel and hospitality provider Ovolo Group, told Bloomberg TV that the flight bans resulted in a 45 per cent drop in occupancy at the Ovolo’s two hotels in Hong Kong.
