Hong Kong announced it will ban passenger flights from the United Kingdom starting Thursday, citing the spread of the delta variant of coronavirus.
The former British colony said in a Monday news release that it designated the U.K. as “extremely high-risk” due to spread of the virus and will ban flights to restrict any person who has been in the U.K. for more than two hours.
“A number of cases imported from the U.K. involving variant virus strains have persistently been detected in the past few days,” the announcement said.
Hong Kong’s travel restriction framework provides that if five or more passengers from an originating destination test positive for COVID-19 with a relevant virus variant within seven days of arrival, the government will impose restrictions. Ten or more passengers testing positive through any available tests, including those conducted during a passenger’s quarantine period, within seven days of arrival, also triggers the restriction.
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Hong Kong previously restricted travel from the U.K. in December under these conditions because of virus spread but began to ease restrictions this spring due to a “greatly improved” pandemic situation, the announcement said.
“As the number of the relevant imported cases has reached the threshold mentioned above, the government will on July 1 invoke the place-specific flight suspension for the UK, and specify the UK as a Group A1 specified place,” it added.
Hong Kong will continue to consider Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South Africa as “extremely high-risk” locations subject to restricted travel.
“The Government will continue to closely monitor the epidemic situation of various places, the prevalence of new virus variants, vaccination progress, and changes in the volume of cross-boundary passenger traffic, and will adjust the boarding and compulsory quarantine requirements for persons arriving at Hong Kong from relevant places as the situation warrants,” a spokesman for the government said.
New daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been creeping upward in the U.K. since mid-May. The seven-day rolling average of new daily cases was about 1,518 on May 19, according to Our World in Data. On June 27, the average was just under 14,654 cases.
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On June 14, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that his government was slowing down the easing of pandemic restrictions because of the uptick in virus spread.
The U.K. currently discourages travel to Hong Kong, which it considers to be an “amber” country under its color-coded travel regime, and has its own restrictions on travel from there, including testing and quarantine requirements. The United States is also currently in the amber category and subject to the same restrictions.
