Secretary for Food and Health, Professor Sophia Chan:
Recently see a increase in local cases. Today, we will announce that there will be 26 new cases today, including 21 local cases.

There are staycation clusters, dance club clusters, taxi driver clusters.

There are over 30 preliminary positive cases already today.

Everyone in HK must immediately become vigilant.

Most of these cases have come from unmasked activities.

Suspension of lower primary school classes: With the URTI outbreaks, the EDB has decided Primary 1 to Primary 3 for 14 days.

Kindergartens and child care centres will be closed until 6th of December.

As pointed out earlier, even though masks are mandatory, the URTI outbreak and COVID-19 share a similar transmission route. Concerned COVID-19 starts spreading through schools.

Understand that closing schools if problematic for parents, and there were discussion to close all...

...schools, but it was decided to start with the classes with the highest infection of URTI numbers.

We still have untraceable cases, and are on the rise.

The recent cases including staycations and dance clubs, we are regulating guest house and hotel numbers.

We will announce more once the details are finalised.

Changes to social distancing measures will be announced in the near future, but if case numbers continue to rise, we will stringently tight the measures, and not rule out closing various premises.

Mandatory testing: 3 groups have been chosen.

1. Those with symptoms

2. Elderly home staff

3. Taxi drivers (i think)

COVID-19 test vending machines has been increased to 17.

Clusters are scattered in different districts. We are preparing to send mobile collection centres to designated districts.

The 4th wave may not be avoided.

The public should immediately reduce activities that don't involve masks, and group/family gatherings.

Q&A:
Primary 1-3 was targeted, ~80% of the URTI cases were in the lower grades, and also those kids are harder to enough social distancing/mask.

26 confirmed cases: We can see there are clusters. The dancing cluster very worrying, given the numbers of people involved. Especially no masks.

We're calling people to go for testing if you visited the 2 studios, even if CHP hasn't contacted you.

There are 47 outpatient clinics giving out test bottles, and the 4 community testing centres. We may increase the number of community testing centres

re Travel Bubble: there is a mechanism in place, and we will adhere to that.

(5+ local unknown source cases on a 7 day moving average)

regarding closing scheduled premises (like dancing clubs): Nothing has been arranged thus far, but we will step up inspection and enforcement.

Director - Department of Health, Constance Chan: In the past, URTI outbreaks may not have closed classes. Looking at the outbreak, it's worse than last year. The number of outbreak were at 274 schools last week.

As of yesterday there were 151 primary schools reporting outbreaks.