Shanghai Converting Office Buildings into Quarantine Sites as Omicron Outbreak Hits 131,000 Cases

The lockdown in China’s largest city continued on Friday as health authorities registered more than double the number of symptomatic cases. However, the vast majority of cases in the six-week-long outbreak have been asymptomatic, with total cases since March 1 hitting 131,000.

Health officials in the eastern metropolis of Shanghai recorded 824 new symptomatic cases of COVID-19 and a total of 21,222 new cases on Thursday, breaking the city’s record for the seventh consecutive day, according to the Shanghai Health Commission.

The city went under lockdown two weeks ago as cases ballooned, with the closures expected to end on April 5. However, the explosion of cases has forced authorities to double down and begin searching for more quarantine and treatment spaces. According to the South China Morning Post, the financial hub is converting conference centers and public facilities, adding tens of thousands of bunks to complement the 77,000 hospital beds already set aside for those suffering from COVID-19.

A graph of symptomatic and asymptomatic cases in Shanghai since the beginning of the outbreak on March 1, 2022, until April 7.

© Li Yi/ Shanghai Daily

While there have not been any deaths reported in Shanghai due to the latest COVID-19 wave, one person was in serious condition on Thursday, according to the local paper Shanghai Daily.

The massive city of 25 million has drawn on resources from surrounding regions, with about 38,000 medical staff from 15 provinces being sent there and Chinese military transport aircraft flying in army medical staff as well as advanced testing equipment and protective gear.

Meanwhile, most transportation connections are shut down, including the airport, port and rail lines, as health officials rush to test the city’s entire population again and again. According to the SCMP, officials tested all residents four times between April 3 and 7, with the most recent using both antigen and nucleic tests to guard against false negatives.

On the one hand, residents have gushed about the extensive support network funneling food, medicine and other goods to residents under lockdown, while on the other, safety measures such as the extermination of pets owned by those who test positive and are sent to quarantine have aroused fury.

The food delivered to your door in hotel quarantine wasn’t bad either. Maybe a little greasy for my Cantonese taste. The breakfast was the best — the go-to baozi and tea egg. pic.twitter.com/MvbJSXanAZ

— tings chak 翟庭君 (@t_ings) April 3, 2022

Two other outbreaks are also raging in China. In the northern Jilin Province, an outbreak that started in early March has continued to grow, even as officials in the city of Jilin announced on Friday that the city’s lockdown had totally ended community spread of the disease. The virus is still spreading in the nearby larger city of Changchun, albeit more slowly than before, and a Wednesday estimate by a Peking University professor suggested the province’s total daily positive causes could hit 120,000 by early May.

In the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, a semi-autonomous region off the southern Chinese coast, a catastrophic outbreak that began in January has finally begun to recede. Just 2,492 cases were reported by health authorities on Friday, having peaked at 72,600 new cases on March 4. The city has counted 1.185 million cases in total and 8,643 deaths, the vast majority of which occurred this year. However, researchers at the University of Hong Kong projected in mid-March that the true number of infections was closer to 3.6 million - half the population of the Chinese special administrative region.

The outbreaks have eclipsed the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019, which set off the global pandemic in early 2020 and only had about 85,000 cases and 4,600 deaths. China has since maintained a “zero Covid” strategy in stark contrast to the West’s “living with Covid” approach, helping to keep Covid outbreaks small and under control until the ultra-transmissive Omicron variant reached China in early 2022. The mainland has registered about 275,000 cases since the initial outbreak, but just a handful of deaths since then, including just two in all of 2021.