Health officials on Tuesday announced changes to the way daily Covid figures are reported, with rapid antigen test (RAT) results no longer being counted until they're confirmed by PCR tests.
The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) said the false positive rate was between 15 and 25 percent, as people are suspected of declaring fake or delayed RAT results to try to bypass the vaccine pass scheme.
"The false positive rate has exceeded what we can accept. So we have been removing the false positive cases after PCR tests showed they didn't have the virus," Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan of the Centre for Health Protection said.
"We think this is not ideal, so we will change our way of reporting the cases. For positive rapid test results that have not been checked by PCR tests, we will not consider them as confirmed infections."
For Tuesday, there were 231 Covid cases confirmed via PCR tests, along with 258 PCR-confirmed infections from the past few days from people who'd tested positive via RAT.
Meanwhile, the CHP has ordered some 30 primary students of a school in North Point to stop attend classes for one week over a cluster of infections there.
Five students and two teachers have tested positive for Covid-19 at one class in the international section of Kiangsu-Chekiang Primary School.
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USEFUL LINKS
General Covid-19 situation: https://www.coronavirus.gov.hk/eng/
Covid-19 testing: https://www.communitytest.gov.hk/en/
Community Clinics for Covid-19 patients: https://bit.ly/3a4BZFE
RAT reporting platform: https://www.chp.gov.hk/ratp/
Vaccination programme: https://www.covidvaccine.gov.hk/sen/
Vaccination pass scheme: https://www.coronavirus.gov.hk/eng/vaccine-pass.html
Hotline for Covid-positive patients: 1836 115