Hong Kong officials will visit Shenzhen this weekend to request help in tackling its latest outbreak, HK01 reported, citing people it didn’t identify. The Hong Kong government will seek to secure personnel from the mainland to boost the city’s testing capacity to at least 600,000 a day from the current 200,000, the news site said.

Hong Kong will also request to build another makeshift isolation and medical facility and move all preliminary positive cases -- who are currently isolated at home -- to the new venue as soon as possible, the report said. Hong Kong’s existing makeshift isolation facility in AsiaWorld-Expo is full, partly due to groups of elderly home residents being isolated to avoid cluster outbreaks in nursing homes.

The city announced its first coronavirus deaths in five months on Wednesday, and new daily cases are now around 1,000. Researchers from the University of Hong Kong have said that nearly 1,000 residents may die by mid-June if there aren’t changes to social distancing rules.

Considering the worsening outbreak in Hong Kong, China may further delay lifting quarantine for residents returning from Hong Kong amid Covid-19 outbreaks on both sides of the border, capping visitors to the city in 2022 at 6 percent of pre-pandemic levels, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Catherine Lim. Hong Kong retail sales could rise 3.5 percent year-over-year if more tourists were allowed to enter the city without quarantine over 2022.