Months of debilitating street protests and the tit-for-tat tariff battle between Washington and Beijing had weighed on the local economy for months before the pandemic helped push the city deeper into recession.
Advance figures released Monday showed an 8.9 percent on-year contraction in the first quarter - the worst decline since the government began compiling data in 1974.
The result was a bigger fall than the 8.3 percent recorded during the Asian financial crisis in 1998 and the 7.8 percent seen in early 2009.
"Faced with a collapse in global demand, Hong Kong's small, open economy is taking a severe hit," Bloomberg Intelligence economist Qian Wan said in a note to clients ahead of the results.
The figures were worse than most projections, even though the city has made impressive headway against the coronavirus outbreak. Despite its proximity and links with the Chinese mainland, confirmed infections have been kept to around 1,000 with just six deaths.
The financial hub has managed to largely end local transmissions of the disease, with almost all new cases coming from people returning to the city from overseas who are quickly quarantined. Officials are beginning to ease some social distancing measures, in a move that will boost the local economy.