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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (178254)	9/14/2021 12:26:17 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217860

The HK domestic helper quarantine facility is open and was booked in minutes bullish scmp.com Hong Kong coronavirus: 800 quarantine rooms for domestic helpers gone within minutes of becoming available The rapid filling of the available spots at the Penny’s Bay facility easily outpaces the 24 hours it took to book the 409-room Silk Tsuen Wan hotel Online queues were already forming before the reservation system went live at 9am on Tuesday; by 9.30am, it was inaccessible Published: 11:29am, 14 Sep, 2021 Eight hundred rooms at the Penny’s Bay quarantine centre became available on Tuesday morning. Within minutes, they were all booked. Photo: Sam Tsang A Hong Kong quarantine facility offering 800 places for the swelling number of foreign domestic workers headed back to the city was fully booked within minutes of its online reservation system opening on Tuesday morning. Users were allowed to start waiting 45 minutes before attempting to snare one of the spots dedicated to inbound workers – mainly arrivals from the Philippines and Indonesia – at the government’s Penny’s Bay quarantine facility. The booking system, which was offering rooms from September 20, opened at 9am on Tuesday, with online queues forming even earlier. By 9.30am, a Postreporter was unable to access the system at all. “The centre only accepts bookings until October 19, and was fully booked within five minutes,” Cheung Kit-man, chairman of Hong Kong Employment Agencies Association, said. A ban on travellers from the Philippines and Indonesia prompted complaints from prospective employers as the domestic helper labour pool shrank. Photo: Dickson Lee Even after a reservation has been successfully submitted online, the application does not necessarily guarantee a room reservation, according to a notice on the system. The Labour Department must then process the applications to verify the travel documents and vaccination records of the helper. The entire process can take up to three to four days, with a call from the department to confirm the reservation. A 21-day quarantine stay at the government-run facility, including three meals per day, costs HK$10,080 (US$1,295). But as the facility does not have Wi-fi, helpers have been told to bring their own mobile phone and charger, along with a functioning SIM card, so they can communicate with health authorities. The 409 rooms at the Silka Tsuen Wan Hotel (pictured) proved incapable of handling the inbound flow of domestic workers. Photo: Felix Wong The Hong Kong government announced on Friday that the Lantau Island facility would begin operating as quarantine accommodation for fully vaccinated foreign domestic workers, after complaints that the more expensive 409-room Silka Tsuen Wan hotel had been fully booked. The Silka, which charges HK$800 per night, was fully booked within 24 hours of its reservation system opening. Before Tuesday, it was the sole quarantine possibility for incoming workers after the government’s decision to begin recognising vaccination records from the Philippines and Indonesia. Previous coronavirus travel bans on those destinations – the two countries that supply most of the city’s foreign domestic workers – led to a labour shortage in the sector and complaints from employment agencies and would-be employers alike. Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said in late August that the special arrangement of allowing workers from the two high-risk destinations had to be “rationed and controlled”.