HONG KONG – Hong Kong to shorten mandatory hotel quarantine for passenger flight crews to three days from seven, while cargo crews will be exempt, modest steps at unwinding coronavirus curbs that have turned the city into one of the world’s most isolated places.
The changes, which take effect in May, give the global financial hub’s aviation trade and logistics industries “much-needed survival space”, the government said in a statement on Friday.
Hong Kong said it was also lifting an outbound travel alert on overseas countries from May 1, more than two years after it was first implemented in March 2020.
“The epidemic situations in overseas countries/territories with frequent traffic with Hong Kong have generally been on a downward trend…The risk of travelling overseas has lowered relatively,” the government said in a separate statement.
Hong Kong has some of the world’s strictest COVID-19 rules. Non-residents will be allowed to enter the city for the first time in more than two years from May, the government announced on April 22.
It has also slightly adjusted rules for airlines that carry infected COVID-19 patients, with the threshold for suspending incoming flights rising to five infected passengers from three currently. A ban on individual airline routes will be shortened to five days from seven from May.
