Hong Kong looks at easing travel for vaccinated residents: Lam

Hong Kong is looking into making it easier for vaccinated residents to travel to encourage more people to get inoculated, Chief Executive Carrie Lam said in a statement on Saturday.
“We have been actively studying whether social distancing measures can be further adjusted if a certain number of people are vaccinated, and we will discuss with other regions whether we can mutually provide travel convenience to vaccinated tourists,” Lam said in an emailed release.
About 430,000 people in Hong Kong have received at least the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine since the city began inoculating on Feb. 26, according to Lam. This accounts for 6.6% of people in Hong Kong aged 16 or older who are eligible for inoculation, she said.
Hong Kong has imposed a stringent tracing and testing program and conducted 100,000 nucleic acid tests a day on average in March, according to Lam. After an outbreak in a gym near the city center this month, an average of 10 close contacts were identified for each confirmed case. About 1,500 people from the cluster were sent to quarantine centers and some 3,300 people underwent virus testing, the chief executive said in the statement.

Fosun, BionTech find no safety issues
Initial investigations by BioNTech SE and its regional distributor found no safety concerns with batches of vaccines sent to Macau and Hong Kong, after packaging defects prompted a halt in the use of the Covid-19 vaccine in the city.
Early findings didn’t rule out the possibility that packaging defects may have been because of environmental factors during long-haul transport, the Hong Kong government said in a statement, without specifying. The government, BioNTech and Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group Co. aim to conclude the investigation within a week, it said.
The vaccination campaign suffered a setback last week when Hong Kong and Macau temporarily suspended shots manufactured by BioNTech because of packaging defects. The suspension risks eroding public confidence in the inoculation, which had provided the SARs residents an alternative to those made by Chinese firms.
The defects, which included loose vial caps and stained bottles, affected a small number of bottles, according to HKSAR officials. About 1.3 million doses have been delivered to the financial hub, and around 150,000 people had received BioNTech shots in Hong Kong prior to the halt.
Fosun and BioNTech have studied the entire supply chain, including the sealing process in BioNTech’s German facilities, vaccine packaging, transport to Hong Kong, logistical processing and storage after their arrival in the city, as well as inspections at community vaccination centers. They found no “obvious systematic factors” that could have led to the defects from packaging to usage, according to the statement.
The companies also said that they didn’t believe the defects were results of cold chain and logistic management issues. Random testing of remaining vaccine vials with intact packaging didn’t find evidence of leakage. PC/Bloomberg