Hong Kong health authorities have said they will adjust Covid testing procedures to allow some people to test from home to ease long queues at designated testing centres as the city's outbreak proves increasingly hard to control.

Health secretary Sophia Chan said some 1.3 million rapid testing kits would be handed out to those in higher risk areas and jobs, and people testing positive would have to register their results online. The rapid testing kits will "remove long queues and be speedier", said Chan, in an adjustment of the city's Covid policies after criticism from some epidemiologists that such queues actually increased the risk of transmission.

Authorities also said they would allow some children testing positive for Covid-19 to remain at home, rather than being separated from their parents and hospitalised, after a public outcry from families across the city.

Read more from Reuters here.