Hong Kong's bars, restaurants and caterers say tighter restrictions aimed at averting a new wave of Covid-19 infections may cause hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, threaten jobs and even, for some, their survival.

The global financial hub is one of the world's last holdouts sticking to a goal of stopping local transmission of the virus, deploying draconian and costly quarantine measures and largely isolating itself from the world.

But a streak of three months without community cases in Hong Kong ended with the confirmation on December 31 of the first local transmission of the Omicron variant — and numbers have been ticking up since then — prompting authorities to reinstate a raft of restrictions on daily life.

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