A group of police officers turned up at at Sai Ying Pun on the night of March 13 to execute the government’s lockdown order, taking residents by surprise.
The lockdown was prompted by the cluster of cases at the Ursus Fitness gym.
Ruoyao Zhang, a 23-year-old HKU student who lived next to the gym, told this reporter that a notice was posted on the first floor of her building, requiring all people, whether residents, visitors, or otherwise, who had been in the building for more than two hours between February 28 and March 13, 2021, to be tested.
People subject to the test were required to go to the Shek Tong Tsui Sports Centre . Those who did not comply with this requirement faced a fine of $5,000. If they still did not get tested after the fine, they could face a further fine of $25,000 and imprisonment for six months, the notice said.
Zhang said she thought the test would be the next day, as the notice indicated. However, a doctor knocked on her door at around 10 p.m. that night and asked her and her room mates to get tested straight away.
After a half hour of wait, a bus arrived to take them to the test site. The bus was partitioned, and Zhang worried that there was not enough air circulation, and that anyone infected on the bus could pass the disease onto everyone else.
The medical staff, who were described as “hasty” by Zhang, took cotton swabs, dabbed them on the front sides of her nostrils and throat, and then told Zhang the test was finished.
Hong Kong residents are required to download the “LeaveHomeSafe” app when they need to enter a venue, such as a restaurant, or take a taxi to scan the QR Code to record their visits. If they are not willing to download it, they can choose to write down their personal information or leave the venue.But Zhang said she did not receive any notification from this app before the compulsory test and that the people in her building were not informed beforehand.
Elinor Zhou, one of Zhang’s roommates, said that she didn’t get any notice about the compulsory test, either. But she didn’t go through the process which Zhang experienced since she happened not to be home that night. When she returned, everything seemed nothing different from the day she left.
