Hong Kong (AFP)

Hong Kong unexpectedly confined during the night of Tuesday to Wednesday a district of the city whose accesses were closed, the time to test all of its inhabitants.

The police cordoned off a perimeter comprising some 20 densely populated buildings in the Yau Ma Tei district, located in the south of the Hong Kong peninsula.

This new strategy consists of not warning the population of confinement.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam explained that such "unannounced lockdowns" are needed to prevent people from fleeing before those in charge of screening are deployed.

"I thank the inhabitants of this small area for their cooperation," she wrote on her Facebook page on Wednesday, after the measures were lifted.

This weekend, a similar two-day lockdown had leaked to the press a few hours earlier.

During the operation carried out on Tuesday, smaller than the previous one, some 330 inhabitants were tested and only one case of coronavirus was detected.

Authorities have warned that more such lockdowns may be needed in the coming days.

Hong Kong was on the front lines when the first cases of the new coronavirus were detected in central China over a year ago.

Its approximately 7.5 million inhabitants have been living for a year under more or less severe restrictions that have proven to be effective in preventing an outbreak of cases but are weighing considerably on the economy.

Since the start of the pandemic, just over 10,000 cases have been identified and more than 170 deaths formally attributed to Covid-19.

In recent weeks, sources of contamination have appeared in very disadvantaged neighborhoods, revealing glaring inequalities in this international financial center.

On paper, Hong Kong is among the wealthiest cities on the planet, but it suffers from a severe housing shortage and sky-high rents.

The average surface area of ​​housing is 46 square meters for which it is necessary to pay for the purchase some 7 million Hong Kong dollars (740,000 euros).

Many residents live in smaller dwellings, cut into tiny units of less than five square meters with barely enough to fit a bed.

Kitchen and bathrooms are often shared by several tenants.

It is in this type of building that most of the outbreaks of contamination have appeared in recent weeks.

© 2021 AFP