Lam said the current wave was more complex and serious than the previous one.

She said that as part of the new measures, restaurants would be banned from accepting visitors after 6 p.m., beauty salons, gyms and sports facilities would be forced to temporarily close.

The chief executive did not specify when the new restrictions would take effect.

At the end of November, the fourth wave of the epidemic began in Hong Kong, at the beginning of which most cases were in one way or another associated with one of the city's dance clubs. Over the past day, 78 new cases of infection were registered in the city, in total 6,975 COVID-19 cases have been registered in Hong Kong during the epidemic, with 112 deaths.