REY / AFP Hong Kong began to ease major social distancing measures on Friday with bars, gyms, beauty parlours and cinemas reopening their doors after the financial People wearing face masks as a preventative measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus cross a street in the Causeway Bay shopping district in Hong Kong on May 1, 2020. DALE DE LA hub largely halted local transmissions of the deadly coronavirus. Queues formed outside gyms in the semi-autonomous Chinese city on Friday morning for employees to check temperatures as people celebrated the return of some normalcy to the city. Doris, a 39-year-old yoga teacher, said her first classes were already filled after weeks of teaching online. “I’m excited to share again… and see my students,” she told AFP. “I was quite impatient to get back to the gym,” added Alexandre, a 26-year-old finance worker after completing a workout in the city’s commercial district. “It shows that life is starting to get back to normal even though we haven’t been locked up like in Europe,” he added. Will Sutton, an American resident, tweeted pictures of his local gym with partitions placed between running machines. “After three weeks without a workout, whatever… let’s just get back to sweating!” he wrote. The less health-conscious flocked to watering holes, some of which opened their doors as soon as the clock struck midnight. “Last month we lost a lot of money,” bar manager Nikita told AFP as he received the first punters in four weeks. “But still, we are just super happy to be back open.” Most of Hong Kong’s entertainment venues were shuttered in early April when the city suffered a second wave of infections — primarily residents returning from Europe and North America as the pandemic spread rapidly there. But health officials have made impressive headway against the disease thanks to efficient testing, tracing and treatment programmes with just over 1,000 infections and four deaths.