Shanghai aiming to have zero COVID cases outside quarantine centers from buzai232's blog

Shanghai reportedly aims to have zero COVID-19 cases outside of its quarantine centers by Wednesday, in what could be a turning point for the city’s strict “no tolerance” lockdowns that’ve left residents increasingly frustrated.To get more news about shanghai covid cases, you can visit shine news official website.

The target will allow the city to further ease its lockdown and start returning to normal life, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

In order to meet the goal Wednesday, officials will accelerate COVID testing and the transfer of infected residents to quarantine centers, according to a speech by a local Communist Party official.Shanghai imposed strict lockdowns in response to an outbreak driven by the Omicron variant. Since the surge began in early March, the city has counted 320,000 cases.

Under the “no tolerance” policy, only healthcare workers, volunteers, delivery personnel and those with special permission are able to move freely.

The strict rules mean that quarantined residents have to order in food or wait for government drop-offs of vegetables, meat and eggs, BBC reported.Frustrated Shanghai residents, however, have expressed anger on social media over what they say are shortages of food and other items.

Footage posted to Twitter showed people in the locked-down city banging pots on their balconies and chanting, “We want supplies,” France24 reported.Shanghai reported the first fatalities from the city’s current wave of Covid-19, just as local authorities embarked on a plan to gradually restore production and business activity in China’s commercial centre after more than two weeks of lockdown.
New cases in Shanghai fell 10.4 per cent to 22,248, according to data released on Monday, while those showing symptoms declined by 25 per cent to 2,417 cases. The three deaths were among 16 “severe cases” of Covid-19 infections, all of them unvaccinated elderly residents with underlying ailments.
Declining daily cases for the second time in six successive days undergird the government’s push to restore transport links between provinces to ease the pressure on supply chains in the world’s second-largest economy.
Shanghai is on track to resume production at key manufacturing sites after a 16-day citywide lockdown, succumbing to pressure from foreign diplomats, business groups and multinational firms calling for an easing of anti-coronavirus control measures.
Major companies in the fields of automobiles, semiconductors and biomedicines are to submit detailed plans about guarding against the spread of Covid-19 for the local health authorities to review before they are given the go-ahead to resume operations in the so-called closed-loop conditions, the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Information Technology said on Saturday evening.
Saturday’s statement is the first step taken by mainland China’s commercial and financial capital to relax controls on manufacturers, most of which have idled facilities since the beginning of April.
“Shanghai’s anti-coronavirus control and prevention measures have dealt a huge blow to the automotive industry alone,” said David Zhang, a researcher at the North China University of Technology. “The lockdown brought nearly all the thousands of automotive supply-chain firms based in Shanghai to a standstill. This is a serious problem that needs to be tackled as soon as possible.”
The decision to ease the lockdown comes despite the continued spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of Covid-19. Shanghai added 24,820 new Covid-19 cases, 3,238 of them symptomatic, on Sunday. The city’s total number of infections has now topped 350,000 since the outbreak began on March 1.
Wu Jinglei, director of the Shanghai health commission, told a press briefing on Sunday that another round of mass testing would be conducted in the coming days to detect infections and cut transmission chains, as the city remained adamant about achieving its zero-Covid goal. The city has conducted at least nine rounds of citywide mass testing on all of its 25 million residents since April 3.
The city’s government has vowed to detect all Covid-19 cases outside “lockdown areas” and quarantine them to cut transmission chains in a five-day campaign that started on Saturday, said two local government officials who did not want to be identified. The lockdown areas comprise hospitals, quarantine sites and high-risk residential compounds sealed off because at least one infection was found there in the previous seven days.