Sars doctor plays down need for delivery room masks

Sars doctor plays down need for delivery room masks

A former front-line public doctor, who battled the Sars outbreak in 2003, says pregnant women returning from virus-hit Hubei province are relatively low-risk when it comes to transmitting the new coronavirus.



Dr Lui Siu-fai, who used to head the Hospital Authority's New Territories east cluster risk management section, made the comments following reports that nurses at the Prince of Wales Hospital delivery room had been told they couldn't wear the more effective N-95 masks, even though they feared the women could be asymptomatic carriers.



"You really need to assess the risk by people who really know what the situation is to know how to handle it," Dr Lui said, after appearing on a radio programme. "Those patients coming back from Wuhan, they are so-called 'well' - they have no symptoms - so their risks are really quite low. So in terms of them infecting someone else, it's really, really minimal."



Last week, the Hong Kong government brought 469 Hong Kong residents back from Hubei on four chartered flights. Some of them were pregnant.



Hubei, and its capital Wuhan, are at the epicentre of the Covid-19 outbreak, which began late last year. Over 80,000 people on the mainland have caught the respiratory disease and over 3,000 have died.



Meanwhile, health minister Sophia Chan has said it's no time to relax in the fight against the coronavirus, saying there have been rapid outbreaks in many countries across the world.



Writing on her blog, she said people should unite with the government and continue to fight the epidemic.



The minister reiterated that people should consider postponing unnecessary overseas trips. And, if they must go, they should pay attention to the possible risks and the quarantine measures when they return to Hong Kong.



Professor Chan said she was confident Hong Kong could overcome the outbreak.