Coronavirus: Shanghai declares 7,565 areas ‘low-risk,’ easing lockdowns in selected zones as symptomatic cases dip after six rounds of tests
- Residents in ‘low-risk’ areas, with zero cases for 14 days, are allowed to move about and shop
- Chinese economist Lang Hsien-ping said his elderly mother died after waiting in vain at a hospital for her Covid-19 test result before she could receive treatment
Shanghai’s authorities have relaxed the citywide lockdowns in China’s financial and commercial centre, as they reclassified the city’s 16 districts according to the severity of the Covid-19 outbreak after six rounds of mass testing.
A total of 7,565 areas have been declared “precautionary zones”, the lowest-risk category, because they recorded zero cases of the Omicron variant over the past 14 days, the Shanghai government’s Deputy Secretary-General Gu Honghui said during a Monday press briefing, without revealing the number of residents living in those areas.
Jing’an district in Puxi, west of the Huangpu River that cuts through Shanghai, has been declared low risk, as was Jingshan, according to pamphlets distributed to residents notifying them of their freedom to move about. Pudong, on the river’s eastern bank, remains under lockdown.
Shanghai rewrote the city’s daily Covid-19 infections record for the 10th straight day with 26,087 new cases on Monday, bringing the city’s total to 205,000 since March 1.
The vast majority of the cases were asymptomatic, and health authorities have released more than 11,000 people from quarantine after they turned negative. No one had died in the current wave of the Covid-19 outbreak since March, even through the city recorded more cases in a month than the sum of the previous two years.