Health officials said on Sunday that there are signs that local Covid cases are going down as they reported 9,033 new infections, including 129 imported cases.

Chuang Shuk-kwan, from the Centre for Health Protection, said officials need to observe the situation for longer to see if cases are indeed heading downward.

"In the past few days, the caseload seems to have come down a bit. There are signs of a decrease in the total tally. But we still need to see over a longer period of time of how things go," she told a daily briefing.

Chuang said officials are watching to see if cases involving the more infectious Omicron subvariant BA.5 have peaked, and if there will be a rebound of cases after the mid-Autumn festival holidays.

Local cases that involve BA.5 now account for around 65 percent of all local cases, she added.

A government pandemic advisor, Lau Yu-lung, said he expects cases to peak in around a week's time, noting Hong Kong had recorded around 10,000 to 11,000 cases a day in the past 10 days.

About 2,700 Covid patients are being treated in public hospitals, and twelve are in intensive care. Eleven Covid patients have died, though five of them are not believed to be directly linked to the virus.

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