Shanghai finds 6,000 new Covid-19 infections as financial hub’s caseload grows

Name: Shanghai imposes phased lockdowns as daily Covid infection numbers surge beyond 3,000
Uploaded: 2022-03-30T07:51:41.000Z
Duration: 2 min 51 s
Description: Shanghai imposes phased lockdowns as daily Covid infection numbers surge beyond 3,000

It records its highest daily tally of current outbreak, after steady rise in recent days

5.7 million residents of the city’s Pudong New Area are under a four-day lockdown, with Puxi set to follow

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Workers in protective suits keep watch in an area that has been sealed off in Shanghai. Photo: Reuters

Josephine Ma

Published: 3:51pm, 30 Mar 2022Updated: 9:01pm, 30 Mar 2022

Shanghai reported almost 6,000 new local Covid-19 infections on Wednesday, as the financial hub’s outbreak continued to spread.

The municipality, which on Monday began a partial lockdown, announced 5,982 new local cases – its highest tally of this outbreak. They comprised 326 symptomatic and 5,656 asymptomatic infections.

Authorities in the city of 25 million people said at the weekend that a two-phase lockdown would be enforced. It represented a U-turn days after officials rejected the idea of mass lockdown, saying that they would refrain from imposing such extreme measures to avoid disrupting economic activity.

Numbers of local cases in Shanghai have been increasing steadily in the past few days, so far with no sign of a plateau, although mass screening during the lockdown would be expected to uncover more cases than previously.

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Shanghai imposes phased lockdowns as daily Covid infection numbers surge beyond 3,000

“I would expect case numbers to increase for a few more days, but the incubation period of [sub-variant] BA.2 is much shorter than that of previous strains, so the impact of lockdowns should be apparent quite quickly,” said Professor Ben Cowling, head of the epidemiology and biostatistics division at the University of Hong Kong.