Shanghai sees sharpest case drop amid latest outbreak
Citywide test to ‘ help decide on easing COVID controls’
Positive signs flicker in Shanghai with the sharpest case drop recorded since the latest outbreak, and only a small proportion of cases found outside the quarantined areas. Yet municipal officials, believing it is far from time to let their guard down, kicked off another round of mass testing and doubled down on restrictions on leaving Shanghai, to prevent the infection from spilling over.
New cases dropped 13 percent in Shanghai to 16,980 on Monday, while confirmed cases declined by about one- third to 1,661 compared with Sunday and new fatalities reached 52. This, according to city’s officials, marks the sharpest drop of case numbers since the outbreak. 90 percent of the new cases were found within the quarantined areas.
The city, with a population of 25 million, has recorded total infections exceeding 500,000 since the tail end of February, officials said.
On Tuesday, Zhao Dandan, a deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, said that the curve of the outbreak has been flattened and is dropping, yet it is far from time for the city to let its guard down. Zhao said that Shanghai is strictly sticking to the policy of “not leaving Shanghai unless unnecessary” to prevent the infection from spilling over to other places.
The city started another round of mass testing on Tuesday. Some districts set up tents under the eaves of shopping malls to evade the rain. Several residents said that the bad weather has partly affected the government’s plan. A Shanghai resident Li Cuihua said that her community held off the test until the rain stopped.
This mass testing is likely to provide data for Shanghai to further relax its restrictive policies in certain areas after the Labor Day holidays in early May, as the city’s lockdown has dragged into the fourth week, said a Beijing- based immunologist.
According to Zhao, Shanghai has been screening some 10 million people on a daily basis recently. Medical workers in neighboring provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui have made 200,000 one- day trips to Shanghai to help testing, and a total of 25,000 medical workers from other provinces are also in Shanghai testing the city’s residents.
Shanghai’s strict measures to expand testing have helped stem viral infections within communities, and they go along with the city’s goal of stamping out infections within all communities by early May, said Chen Xi, an associate professor of public health at Yale University. He also pointed out the hidden danger is to avoid infections during mass testing.
Epidemiologists said that the treatment of severe cases will be the major task for Shanghai, as the city has seen increasing numbers of severe cases and deaths in recent days.
Zhao said that 52 deaths were reported in Shanghai for Monday, which took the city’s death tally during to 190. So far, 86.32 percent of the deceased were aged above 70.