Shanghai extends COVID lockdown till Apr 26 as death toll rises to 36
Shanghai has extended the COVID lockdown, which entered its fourth week, to April 26 amid reports of growing public resentment as the eastern metropolis city of 26 million reported 11 more deaths on Thursday, taking the death toll in the current outbreak to 36.
China on Thursday reported 2,119 locally transmitted confirmed COVID-19 cases, of which 1,931 were in Shanghai, the National Health Commission (NHC) said on Friday.
Shanghai added 17,629 new cases in the previous 24 hours, 4.7 per cent fewer than a day earlier, according to data released on Friday, taking the citys cumulative cases to 443,500 from March 1.
Symptomatic cases fell 26.7 per cent to 1,931, in the biggest one-day decline since the outbreak, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Friday.
Also 30,813 people with confirmed COVID-19 cases undergoing treatment in hospitals across the country, the NHC said.
Thursday also saw 11 deaths from COVID-19, all in Shanghai, bringing the mainlands total COVID-19 deaths since the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan in 2019 December to 4,674 as per official data.
Meanwhile, Shanghai has extended a standstill order throughout the city to April 26, tightening its stranglehold on a lockdown thats entering its fourth week to track down every Omicron case in one of Chinas largest population centres, the Post report said.
City authorities extended their static management measures until next Tuesday to plug the loopholes around unguarded compounds, where infections have flared up again after days of remaining dormant.
The standstill order curbs the movements of medical staff, health officials, delivery couriers and community volunteers in those areas, the report said.
As Shanghai is all set to prolong the lockdown, the city officials announced a series of measures, including easing stringent anti-virus rules for truck drivers to improve supplies as well as monetary support for business to improve the metropolis economy, which came to standstill in the last three weeks, sparking concerns of huge production losses.
In an attempt to address the public complaints of lack of access to food, electronic passes would be given to truck drivers to cross city and province boundaries, deputy mayor Zhang Wei told the official media.
The local administration also announced six months of free rent for 80,000 small enterprises in government-owned buildings in the city as well as loans to the tune of USD 10 billion for business, Chinese daily The Paper reported.
Shanghai will start a series of campaigns on Friday to cut off all COVID-19 transmission chains in communities as soon as possible, local authorities said.
Tiered community control measures will be carried out to minimise the movements and gatherings of people, according to the arrangements of the municipal committee of the Communist Party of China and the local government, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
Other campaigns include carrying out epidemiological investigations, traditional Chinese medicine intervention, as well as cleaning and disinfection, it said.
Additional mass tests will be conducted throughout the city in varying frequencies depending on the risks of infection in each area, as Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan who is currently stationed in the city pushed local authorities to be relentless in tracing, isolating and treating every single case of the disease in Chinas new Covid-19 epicentre.
Streets and towns where the outbreak remains severe need to be highlighted with strengthened efforts to eradicate the virus there, Sun told local officials in a work conference on Thursday.
We must accelerate the pace of chasing a societal zero-COVID goal, Sun was quoted as saying in the Post report.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Federal staff and is auto-published from a syndicated feed.)