What’s new: Shanghai limited the services of two hospitals and raised the risk level to medium in a downtown residential complex Thursday after confirming three locally transmitted Covid-19 infections.
A 56-year-old logistics worker at the Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, also known as the Shanghai Cancer Hospital, tested positive in a routine screening of hospital contractors. A 53-year-old man who works at Renji Hospital and is a neighbor of the first patient also tested positive. The third case involves a friend of the first patient.
The residential complex where the first two patients live, a few hundred meters from Shanghai’s famous Bund district, was listed as medium-risk area. Residents of the complex are not allowed to leave Shanghai unless they have negative test results within the previous seven days.
Both hospitals closed their outpatient services. More than 6,000 staff at Shanghai Cancer Hospital have been tested. Several other major hospitals have also started mass staff testing.
The new cases were detected in preemptive screening, and local health authorities are confident about controlling the outbreak, said Zhang Wenhong, director of the infectious diseases department at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai.
“We ran faster than the virus this time,” he said.
The background: The new cases in Shanghai were reported after multiple cities across the northern provinces of Hebei, Heilongjiang and Jilin recently found clusters of infections. China’s National Health Commission reported more than 100 new confirmed cases across the country Wednesday.
Two cities in northeast China’s Jilin province were locked down following a recent resurgence of Covid-19 traced to a superspreader. Hebei provincial capital Shijiazhuang and the cities of Xingtai and Langfang with a combined population of 23 million people were locked down last week after the province reported more than 500 cases in the latest round of outbreak.
Beijing imposed a partial lockdown Wednesday after about a dozen new Covid-19 cases were detected, including two cases of the more transmissible variant originally discovered in the United Kingdom.
Contact reporter Denise Jia (huijuanjia@caixin.com) and editor Bob Simison (bobsimison@caixin.com).
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