HONG KONG: Authorities in Macao told residents to conduct at least two days of COVID 19 tests after a person who had travelled from the Chinese special administrative region to the neighbouring city of Zhuhai was found to have been infected with the virus.
The move came days after Macao started to unwind stringent anti-COVID rules, including the resumption of travel to Zhuhai without quarantine from Aug 3.
The Macao government said on Monday that all of the city's 700,000 residents should take rapid antigen tests on Sunday and Monday and upload the results to a government website.
Thousands of residents living near Macao's border to Zhuhai and the Taipa district, which sits alongside the city's Las Vegas-style Cotai strip, must do official nucleic acid tests, the government said.
The authorities also sealed up the infected person's apartment building and the supermarket where the person worked.
Macao reopened public services and entertainment facilities and allowed the resumption of in-restaurant dining on August 2.
Since mid-June, around 1,800 infections have been reported in the former Portuguese colony when it was hit with its worst coronavirus outbreak that forced the closure of casinos and locked down most of the city.
More than 90 per cent of Macao's residents are fully vaccinated against COVID 19 but authorities closely followed China's zero-COVID mandate which seeks to curb all outbreaks at any cost, contrary to much of the rest of the world that is already adjusting to living with the disease.