More than 300,000 people joined a rush to register for free government-issued masks within two hours of registration opening in the morning, with waiting times shown as more than an hour at the opening time, RTHK reports. At 8:00am, an attempt to register gave the queue number as 175,000, with more than 3,000 people waiting for the chance to register. At 7am, the website had suggested the waiting time would be up to an hour, although the registration page loaded in about 10 minutes. Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced on Tuesday that the reusable, washable masks would be made available to all Hong Kong residents. Lam said the government had set aside HK$800 million as part of its anti-epidemic fund to subsidise the development of reusable masks – and now this has borne fruit.

Source: The Standard May 06, 2020 01:41 UTC