Hong Kong residents in areas with Covid-19 cases to be barred from quarantine-free travel to mainland China under colour-coded system
- New health code will hit pause on cross-border travel for those living near site of infection, but how wide a geographical area will be covered has yet to be decided
- Residents in designated ‘yellow’ zones could wait as long as three weeks for testing to be completed before their QR codes are returned to green, the colour needed for entry
The health code will open for registration on Friday, and authorities are still working on the parameters of its “green”, “yellow” and “red” QR system.
It will be linked to the existing “Leave Home Safe” risk-exposure app, and while joining the new scheme is voluntary, anyone wanting to cross the border without undergoing isolation must use the new code. Only the green one will be accepted at crossing points.
Under proposals being considered by Hong Kong health authorities, participating residents living in the same building as a coronavirus patient would have their codes turn red, while those in the surrounding area would be assigned a yellow one due to the elevated risk of infection.
Once all residents in the designated area have taken a series of compulsory coronavirus tests – which could take as long as 19 days to complete after an infection is first discovered – their QR code will return to green if no more cases have been identified.
But just how large a geographical area the yellow code would cover had yet to be determined, a government source said.
“The delineation is a risk-based judgment, but it also has to be administratively operable,” the insider said. “Since there is no tracing function [on the ‘Leave Home Safe’ app], we have no choice but to be more liberal in delineating yellow.”
