HK reports 100 new virus cases, revives ban on evening dine-in

At the same briefing, Hospital Authority's Chief Executive Tony Ko said patients are getting younger.

Three of the 38 people currently in critical condition are aged below 50 while seven are below 60, he added.

The city's total number of confirmed coronavirus infections reached 7,075, which means one out of every 1,000 Hong Kong residents has once contracted the virus.

The fresh count included five imported cases and 95 locally transmitted ones, Chuang Shuk-kwan of the Centre for Health Protection (CHP) said at a separate briefing in the afternoon. Twenty-seven of the new cases were untraceable, close to the average in the past week.

Chuang said the CHP saw two of its staffers confirmed as infected and another preliminarily positive on Tuesday. Four people working at the center are now infected.

Thirteen new infections belonged to the dance club cluster, which has snowballed to have more than 660 confirmed patients, according to Chuang.

Speaking to the press before the weekly Executive Council meeting on Tuesday morning, the city's Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor described the fourth wave of infection as "very worrying".

Lam said the current wave is more complicated than previous outbreaks because many clusters have sprung up and patients can be found in all of the city's 18 districts.

The Asian financial hub is struggling to contain its latest wave of COVID-19 infections, with case numbers often exceeding 100 a day last week -- the most since August. That has prompted the government to gradually tighten its social distancing rules, recently raising fines for those breaching restrictions and sending civil servants back to working from home.