Shanghai tells residents not to leave homes as COVID cases peak

Shanghai on Tuesday again tightened the first phase of a two-stage COVID-19 lockdown, asking some residents to stay indoors as the number of daily cases rose beyond 4,400.

China’s biggest city and financial hub is in its second day of a lockdown local authorities are carrying out by splitting the city roughly along the Huangpu River, dividing the historic centre from the eastern business and industrial district of Pudong to allow for staggered testing.

While the caseload remains modest by global standards, the city has become a testing ground for the country’s “zero-COVID” strategy as it tries to bring the highly infectious Omicron variant under control.

Residents east of the Huangpu were initially locked down on Monday, but mostly allowed to roam around their compounds. On Tuesday, however, they were told they were not allowed to cross their doorsteps.

Wu Qianyu, an official with the municipal health commission, said on Tuesday that residents should not leave home, even to take pets for a walk or throw out trash.

“This is in fact a key stage in nucleic acid testing and we have made a clear request for people in locked down areas to stay home,” she said.

She said 17,000 testing personnel from Shanghai and surrounding regions had set up 6,300 stations and conducted a total of 8.26 million tests in the city’s locked-down districts on Monday.

“The vast numbers of medical staff, grass-roots cadres, community workers and volunteers shared the very hard work on the front line of epidemic prevention and control, and should be thanked,” she said.