Hong Kong to suspend passenger flights from Britain as epidemic control measure

China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government announced Monday that from July 1, all passenger flights from Britain will be prohibited from landing in Hong Kong in view of the latest COVID-19 epidemic situation in Britain.

The decision was made as the epidemic situation rebounded recently in Britain with the widespread of the Delta variant virus strain there and a number of cases imported from Britain involving variant virus strains have persistently been detected in Hong Kong over the past few days, the HKSAR government said.

The HKSAR government will also at the same time classify Britain, which is currently a "very high-risk" place, as "extremely high-risk" to restrict persons who have stayed in that place for more than two hours from boarding passenger flights for Hong Kong, so as to stop persons from the relevant place from traveling to Hong Kong via transit.

Considering that the epidemic situation is still unstable in existing extremely high-risk places, which are Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines and South Africa, the existing restrictions on the aforementioned places will continue.