Mindful that Chinese New Year is just around the corner – with all the family socialising that this entails – the Hong Kong government has wasted no time in slapping society with a fresh range of restrictions.

Here are the key ones that you should know about:

1. All large events will be cancelled.
2. Dining inside restaurants will be banned from 5:59pm until 4.59am each day.
3. There will be a limited number of diners on each table at restaurants, based on the category level that the restaurant has been assigned:
   1. At type B restaurants (where all staff are tested every 14 days): no more than two diners per table
   2. At type C restaurants (where all staff have had at least one does of vaccine): no more than four diners per table
   3. At type D restaurants (where all staff are fully vaccinated): no more than six diners per table
4. The following venues will all be closed: bars, karaoke spots, saunas, game centres, beauty clinics, mahjong parlours, swimming pools.
5. Cruise to No-where will be suspended.
6. Visits to hospitals and care homes will not be allowed.

These restrictions will be in place for two weeks, and will then be reassessed.

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This would mean that any visitors from the country will now have to spend their first week of quarantine in a special government isolation facility known as Penny Bay before being spending their remaining 14 days of quarantine in a designated hotel. The government has not yet made an announcement on this but the SCMP says that one is expected “soon”.

Britain is already listed as a Group A high-risk country for Covid-19, which means that travellers from the country are subjected to a 21-day period of hotel quarantine in any case. They must also be fully vaccinated before they are allowed to enter Hong Kong.

But they do not currently have to spend any time at Penny Bay – unless there is a Covid-19 outbreak whilst they are staying at their hotel, and the government considers that additional isolation measures are needed.

On December 13, the UK reported the first official death caused by the omicron variant of Covid-19. Omicron has been rapidly spreading in the UK, and is set to completely displace the delta variant, which had previously been the dominant strain.

In response to the omicron crisis, British prime minister Boris Johnson has offered a Covid-19 vaccine booster shot to every adult over the age of 18, and imposed some new work-from-home measures. However he has stopped short of the kind of lockdown restrictions that were seen earlier in the year.

This is not the first time that Hong Kong has imposed an elevated risk status on the UK. Over the summer, Hong Kong banned anyone who had spent the last 21 days in the UK from entering Hong Kong. These restrictions lasted six weeks.

At the moment nearly 50,000 new cases of Covid-19 are being reported in the UK each day. Around 50 people per day are reported as dying from the virus.

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