Hong Kong’s face mask market: from outdoor furniture manufacturers to filmmakers, here’s how companies adapted

Hong Kong-based outdoor furniture maker 3i Corporation saw its exports to the US and Europe start to stagnate at the beginning of the year as the first reverberations of an economically disastrous global pandemic

 were felt.

To weather the downturn that was to come, the family firm with the unlikely name decided to do what dozens of others were doing: make protective face masks. It started out with two machines in a factory in San Po Kong in April. Today it boasts six, capable of producing hundreds of thousands of masks a day, sold not only online but via three shops.

Hong Kong’s social-distancing measures

 are likely to remain in force until at least the Lunar New Year period and even harsher rules may be imposed to contain the fourth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic

.

Health authorities announced on Monday that current measures such as the ban on public gatherings of more than two people and restaurant dine-in services after 6pm would be extended for another two weeks, while the suspension of face-to-face classes for most schools would continue until the end of the Lunar New Year holiday in February.

Officials confirmed another 53 infections, six of them untraceable, even as they reported a new coronavirus outbreak among patients and medical staff at a public hospital, and revealed that nearly a dozen of Monday’s new cases came from a major construction site.