The COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai has been extended until April 26 despite reports of rising public dissatisfaction as the eastern city of 26 million people reported 11 additional fatalities on Thursday, bringing the total number of deaths in the current epidemic to 36.
According to the National Health Commission, China recorded 2,119 locally transmitted confirmed COVID-19 infections on Thursday, with 1,931 of those cases occurring in Shanghai.
According to statistics provided on Friday, Shanghai has added 17,629 new cases in the past 24 hours, representing a 4.7 percent decrease from the previous day’s total. The city’s total number of cases since March 1 has reached 443,500.
Reports from Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post said that the number of symptomatic patients dropped by 26.7 percent to 1,931, marking the largest one-day drop since the epidemic began.
According to the commission’s report, a total of 30,813 patients with confirmed COVID-19 cases were having treatment in hospitals throughout the nation at the time of writing.
According to government statistics, 11 people died on Thursday from COVID-19, all of them in Shanghai, increasing the total number of fatalities on the Chinese mainland since the coronavirus first surfaced in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019 to 4,674.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Shanghai has extended a standstill order across the city until April 26, further tightening its grasp on a lockdown that is into its fourth week of trying to hunt down every Omicron case in one of China’s most populous cities, according to a story in the Post.
For the time being, the city has prolonged its static management measures until next Tuesday in order to close breaches surrounding unsecured compounds, where illnesses have resurfaced after a period of time in which they had been dormant.
According to the article, the standstill order restricts the activities of medical personnel, health authorities, delivery couriers, and community volunteers in specified locations.
A series of efforts to cut off all COVID-19 transmission links in communities will begin on Friday, according to local officials, with the goal of cutting off all chains as quickly as feasible.
According to the arrangements reached between the municipal committee of the Communist Party of China and the local government, a series of community control measures will be implemented in order to reduce the number of people’s movements and gatherings, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.
There are other initiatives that include conducting epidemiological investigations, traditional Chinese medicine intervention, cleaning and disinfecting, according to the report.
Various frequencies of further widespread mass testing will be carried out throughout the city at varying intervals depending on the risk of infection in each location, as Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan, who is currently stationed in the city, urged local authorities to be relentless in tracing, isolating, and treating every single case of the virus in China’s new COVID-19 epicentre.
Sun instructed local authorities on Thursday that streets and towns where the epidemic is still severe need to be emphasised, and that more measures to eliminate the virus should be made in such areas, according to the Post.
