Coronavirus: Shanghai’s symptomatic cases more than double to 824 as city rewrites records for the seventh day with 21,222 infections

Symptomatic cases rose to 824 on Friday, more than double the 322 cases that showed symptoms a day earlier

Shanghai, the new epicentre of China’s latest coronavirus outbreak, has recorded more than 131,000 cases since the flare-up started on March 1

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Workers in personal protective equipment (PPE) speak to a resident taking part in a round of Covid-19 testing during a lockdown in Shanghai on Thursday, April 7, 2022. Photor: Bloomberg

Published: 11:04am, 8 Apr 2022Updated: 11:40pm, 11 Apr 2022

Shanghai’s Covid-19 cases with symptoms more than doubled to 824 on Friday, after citywide tests found 21,222 new infections over 24 hours, rewriting the daily record for the seventh consecutive day.

China’s financial hub is converting conference centres and public facilities into temporary quarantine and treatment facilities with tens of thousands of bunks, adding to the 77,000 hospital beds already set aside in the city of 25 million residents.

The city remained locked down after more than a week of what began as a rolling shutdown that was supposed to end on April 5. Flights to and from the city’s two airports are mostly grounded, and the world’s largest port on Shanghai’s outskirts is working at half capacity. Still, stock market trading continued in the world’s second-largest capital market, as the exchange instructed officials and technicians to sleep on premises to observe the lockdowns.

Shanghai, the new epicentre of China’s latest coronavirus outbreak, has recorded more than 131,000 cases since the flare-up started on March 1, as the city failed in a series of attempts to contain the highly transmissible Omicron variant. Health authorities are taking no chances, even if the vast majority of the infections – daily symptomatic cases were in triple digits – showed no symptoms, and there had been no fatality in the current wave.

Workers putting together makeshift hospital beds for Covid-19 coronavirus patients in Shanghai on April 7, 2022. Photo: Agence France-Presse

“The battle against the outbreak is still very tough,” according to a Thursday speech by Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan, who had been overseeing the anti-pandemic work in Shanghai since last weekend. “Any sign of relaxation or complacency is unacceptable.”

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