E-Paper
China: Shanghai announces lockdown relief as Covid cases continue to soar
Shanghai, a city of around 25 million residents, will categorise residential units into three risk categories to gradually allow “appropriate activity” by those in neighbourhoods with no positive cases for a two-week stretch.
China’s financial hub Shanghai will begin easing lockdown in a calibrated way, officials announced Monday even as the city reported more than 25,000 new Covid-19 infections for the day before.
The decision comes amid mounting pressure from citizens facing shortages of food, medicine and stringent lockdown measures, in some city areas for three weeks now.
Shanghai, a city of around 25 million residents, will categorise residential units into three risk categories to gradually allow “appropriate activity” by those in neighbourhoods with no positive cases for a two-week stretch, senior city official Gu Honghui said on Monday.
The city has designated 7,624 closed-off management areas, 2,460 restrictive control areas and 7,565 prevention areas, Gu said.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many - or when - the city’s residents will be able to experience the easing of the lockdown but the steps carry the promise of relief.
Shanghai on Sunday registered 914 confirmed local Covid-19 cases and 25,173 asymptomatic infections, the national health commission (NHC) said in its daily bulletin on Monday.
“Each district will announce the specific names of the first batch (of communities) divided into the three types, and three subsequent lists will be announced in a timely manner,” Gu said, explaining the steps.
The “closed-off management” areas refer to residential communities, villages, work units, or venues with Covid-19 infections reported in the past seven days. “People in these areas will undergo seven days of closed-off management plus seven days of health monitoring at home. Door-to-door services will be provided where needed,” Gu said.
The restrictive control areas are those without reported infections in the past seven days, within which people will have to observe seven days of health monitoring at home.
“People who have an urgent need to go to the hospital, among other emergencies, in the aforementioned two areas can exit their respective areas for these purposes, with their movements under closed-loop management.”
In the third category, areas without reported infections over the past 14 days are labelled as prevention areas, where people are allowed in principle to move inside their respective sub-district or town with strict restrictions on the scale of gathering, but are banned from entering the other two types of areas.
Meanwhile, the southern city of Guangzhou on Monday shut down elementary and middle schools, moving classes online after the city reported 27 new Covid-19 cases for Sunday, including 9 asymptomatic infections.
Residents have been asked not to leave the city unless necessary, and would need a negative virus test from within the last 48 hours to do so.
Mainland China, meanwhile, reported 27,059 Covid-19 cases for Sunday including 1,164 locally transmitted symptomatic infections, the NHC said.
Of the new local confirmed cases, 914 were reported in Shanghai, while 187 were reported in the northeastern Jilin province and 19 in the province of Guangdong. The rest were reported in 12 other provincial-level regions, the NHC said.
