(Bloomberg) -- Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam called on residents to promptly report positive results of home Covid tests or face legal consequences, amid reports that the city’s sweeping outbreak is being under-counted.

The Asian financial hub launched a website on March 7 to self-report infections in order to speed up the process of sending high-risk patients to community isolation facilities after a surge of daily cases overwhelmed the city’s gold-standard laboratory testing system.   

“It is incumbent upon us as the government and the law enforcement authority to tell people that there is a legal basis” to disclose, Lam said during her daily briefing on Friday. “If there are people blatantly refusing to comply, then isn’t it upon the law enforcement body to do something?” she said.  

The government would rather have people cooperate and fulfill their civic responsibility, Lam said, adding that there has been a small number of arrests or prosecutions of people breaching quarantine orders. Those who contravene such orders could be fined a maximum of HK$25,000 ($3,200) and jailed for up to six months.

Hong Kong recorded more than 21,000 new infections and 289 deaths, including a backlog of 87, on Thursday. Over the past five days, more reported cases have come from rapid antigen tests taken at home than by the PCR tests run in laboratories. Many people haven’t disclosed positive home test results, however, out of fear that they would be sent to isolation or could be separated from their families. 

A survey of over 450 people found that more than 70% knew someone that tested positive but didn’t report the result. Almost everyone thought the official case figures published by health authorities were too low, underestimating the real size of the outbreak, local media reported on Tuesday. 

University of Hong Kong researchers estimated that about half of the city’s 7.4 million people had been infected by the middle of March, although fewer than 1 million cases have been documented. They forecast that as many as 4.5 million people will catch Covid before the current outbreak ends.  

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