SHANGHAI: Shanghai will remain under lockdown as it reviews results of an exercise to test all of its 26 million residents for COVID-19, authorities said on Monday.
The city began its two-stage lockdown on March 28, initially in Shanghai’s eastern districts, and later expanded to cover the whole city.
The curbs, which have massively disrupted daily life and business operations in China’s financial hub, were initially scheduled to end at 5 a.m. local time (9 p.m. GMT) on Tuesday.
“The city will continue to implement seal and control management and strictly implement ‘staying at home’, except for medical treatment,” the city government said on its official WeChat account. It did not give an indication of when the curbs might lift.
The country sent the military and thousands of healthcare workers into Shanghai to help carry out COVID-19 tests for all of its 26 million residents on Monday, in one of the country’s biggest-ever public health responses.
Some residents woke up before dawn to stand in queues for white-suited healthcare workers to swab their throats as part of nucleic acid testing at their housing compounds.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on Sunday dispatched more than 2,000 medical personnel from across the army, navy and joint logistics support forces to Shanghai, an armed forces newspaper reported.
About 38,000 healthcare workers from provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and the capital Beijing have been dispatched to Shanghai, according to state media, which showed them arriving, suitcase-laden and masked up, by high-speed rail and aircraft.
It is China’s largest public health response since it tackled the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, where the novel coronavirus was first discovered in late 2019. The State Council said the PLA dispatched more than 4,000 medical personnel to the province of Hubei, where Wuhan is, at that time.
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