Ellen's track took it north of the Philippine islands, where three people were killed and 15 injured despite the storm not making a direct landfall. It then curved west-northwest, its final landfall at Portuguese Macau on the morning of September 9 as what meteorologists classify as a minimal typhoon — weakened but still capable of significant damage. The next day, it ceased to exist. In its brief passage near Hong Kong, the winds gusted to 248 kilometres per hour at Stanley. Rainfall at Hong Kong's Royal Observatory — the institution now called the Hong Kong Observatory — reached 231.8 millimetres. Kai Tak Airport, then the only international airport serving the city, was closed for 12 hours and flights were cancelled. Ferry services between Hong Kong and Macau were suspended. The Hong Kong Observatory assessed Ellen as the city's worst typhoon since Typhoon Hope in 1979.

The human cost in Hong Kong was direct and specific. Eight people lost their lives. Among them was a girl crushed by a falling cabinet. Two sisters died in a landslide. A firefighter died while attempting to rescue someone. These were not distant numbers — they were people in the middle of ordinary lives when the storm arrived. Another 339 people were injured, 120 of them seriously; 45 specifically suffered wounds from flying glass and falling objects. More than 2,000 people were left without homes when the storm passed. Of those, 1,600 sought emergency shelter. Large areas of farmland were damaged. The city also lost power for 50,000 residents during the storm's passage, a disruption that compounded the fear and difficulty of those hours.

The sea took its own toll. The 185-foot yacht Osprey was at sea during the typhoon, carrying nine people. Eight of them were lost and presumed dead. Forty crew members from a separate shipwreck were rescued offshore. On September 8, ten fishing boats from Taiwan capsized in the South China Sea; 48 fishermen went missing, though 103 persons survived and eventually took refuge at Pratas Island. In Macau, damage was comparatively minor — but by October 13, ten people there remained missing and were then presumed dead. The full accounting of Ellen's human cost came in slowly, in the weeks after the storm had long since ceased to exist. The overall death toll reached 23 people across the region. Total damage across the affected areas was assessed at approximately $79 million in 1983 US dollars.

Ellen produced something that meteorologists had not seen before in Hong Kong: a tornado spawned during the passage of a typhoon. It was only the second tornado ever recorded in the territory and the first ever documented during a typhoon's passage. The phenomenon is not impossible — tropical cyclones can generate tornadoes under the right conditions — but it was exceptional enough to enter the meteorological record as a notable event. Hong Kong's weather service documented it carefully. The tornado added another layer to Ellen's already notable profile: a storm that arrived from far across the Pacific, intensified over the open ocean, crossed the Philippines, and arrived at Hong Kong carrying within it a smaller rotating vortex, embedded in its outer bands, that touched down and spun and left its own mark on the record.

In the years that followed, Hong Kong would face other severe typhoons — Mangkhut in 2018, Saola in 2023 — and each one prompted comparisons and recalibrations of what the city could withstand. Ellen's place in that history is as a threshold marker: the storm that set the benchmark for 'worst since 1979,' the event that demonstrated how quickly Hong Kong's dense, vertical city could be disrupted by a storm that didn't even make its main landfall there. The families of the eight people who died in Hong Kong, the families of the eight lost from the Osprey, the communities that rebuilt their farmland and their homes in the weeks that followed — they carried the specific, irreplaceable weight of what that September took from them. The storm itself is a footnote in the meteorological record. For the people it reached, it was not.