Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam previously ruled out a lockdown of the city and ordered all 7.4 million residents to get tested in March.

But health official Sophia Chan said on Monday that this option was possible.

Asked on the radio to find out if confinement was still excluded, she replied: “No. We are still in discussion”.

"From a public health perspective, to get the best effect from mandatory universal screening, we need to reduce the movement of people to some extent," she added.

"Residents should stay home or avoid going out as much as possible."

The day before, Li Dachuan, a senior official from mainland China involved in a joint task force with Hong Kong authorities, described the lockdown as "the most ideal and best approach to achieve the best effect of universal testing". .

The announcement adds new uncertainties for residents and businesses in a city which, until then relatively untouched by the coronavirus, is discovering the chaos experienced elsewhere in the world at the start of the pandemic.

Morgues full

Two years of strict "zero Covid" policies have largely contained the coronavirus, but the arrival of the highly transmissible Omicron variant has exposed the flaws in the city's health system and the lack of preparedness for a mass epidemic.

Hong Kong reported 26,000 new infections and 83 deaths on Sunday alone.

Before the current wave, the city had recorded only 12,000 cases since the start of the pandemic.

Aerial view of the new isolation center for people with Covid-19, February 28, 2022 in Hong Kong Peter PARKS AFP

Hospitals have been strained for several weeks and officials revealed on Sunday that bodies were piling up in hospitals because morgues were full.

"Right now, we are facing a problem of transporting corpses from the hospital to the public morgue," hospital authority chief executive Lau Ka-hin told reporters.

Hong Kong's seven-day average death rate is currently around eight per million people.

By way of comparison, this rate is five per million inhabitants in the United States, 1.80 in Great Britain and 1.36 in Singapore which, like Hong Kong, had initially opted for the "zero Covid" but has recently opted for a strategy of reopening to the outside world.

On Sunday, authorities revealed that 91% of those who died in the current wave were not fully vaccinated.

The vast majority of the deceased are elderly.

Despite abundant vaccine supplies, vaccination rates for people over 70 were low in Hong Kong before Omicron arrived.

China is increasingly making decisions about Hong Kong's response.

Mainland teams are building a series of temporary hospitals and isolation wards for those infected.

A woman scans the QR code of a customer's vaccination pass in a restaurant in Hong Kong, February 26, 2022 Bertha WANG AFP

Among the government advisers is Liang Wannian, a senior mainland official and one of the main architects of the success of the two-month lockdown in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic.

But Wuhan's official toll is only 53,000 cases, a fraction of the number of cases in Hong Kong.

© 2022 AFP