Vaccinated visitors to HK, including from Singapore, to serve shorter quarantine

Travellers who have taken all required doses of the vaccines from low-risk areas will have to serve seven days of mandatory quarantine instead of 14. - AFP

HONG KONG (The Straits Times/ANN): From as early as end-April or early May, fully vaccinated visitors to Hong Kong will have their mandatory quarantine reduced by seven days.

For travellers who have taken all required doses of the vaccines from low-risk areas including Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, mandatory quarantine will be seven days instead of 14.

For those from high- and medium-risk areas, they will serve a 14-day quarantine instead of 21 days.

All of these inoculated visitors will have to self-monitor for another seven days after their quarantine, the Hong Kong government said in a release late Wednesday (April 14).

Even as it moves to ease quarantine measures for those inoculated, officials have tightened rules for flights.

As of Wednesday, any flight that has three or more confirmed cases will be banned from Hong Kong, up from the previous threshold of five cases.

The ban will also apply if two flights from the same destination to Hong Kong each has two or more confirmed cases within a seven-day period. Previously, the threshold was two consecutive flights with three infected passengers.

To keep Covid-19 variant N501Y -- discovered in South Africa -- out of Hong Kong as much as possible, the government said that any airline from the same destination that has five confirmed cases or more of this virus variant will be banned from entering the city for 14 days.

An entry ban will also be imposed if a flight passenger has been in a high-risk area for more than two hours.

But once the 14-day period is over and the area is viewed as lower risk, visitors can enter Hong Kong again, and will have to undergo the 21-day quarantine. - The Straits Times/Asia News Network