Shanghai[/B] has set a target to stop by Wednesday the transmission of Covid-19 outside quarantined areas, two people familiar with the matter said, which will allow China's largest city to further relax its lockdown restrictions and begin to return to normalcy.
Shanghai has set a target of stopping Covid-19 transmission outside quarantined areas by Wednesday, two people familiar with the matter said, which will allow China's largest city to further relax its lockdown restrictions and begin to return to normalcy.
The goal requires officials to speed up diagnostic tests and the transfer of cases to quarantine centers, according to a speech yesterday by a local Communist Party official, a copy of which was seen by Reuters.
Shanghai has become the epicentre of the largest outbreak of the disease recorded in China since the virus was first identified in late 2019 in Wuhan and has recorded more than 320.000 Covid infections since the resurgence began in early March.
Residents in Shanghai's lockdowns are finding it hard to find food and have lost income, while complaining about the separation of families and poor conditions in quarantine centres. Closed factories and traffic jams in many parts of China due to Covid-19 restrictions are having an impact on global supply chains.
Shanghai's new goal of "zero cases of Covid at the community level" by April 20 was announced in recent days to Communist Party officials and organizations such as schools, according to the sources, who asked not to be named because the information has not been shared.
The Chinese definition of zero cases of Covid at the community level means that no new cases occur outside quarantined areas.
A speech yesterday by the party secretary in Shanghai's Baoshan district described the new target as an order that came because the city's situation reached a "critical point", with people's anxiety rising and pressures on food supplies.
"The State Council Working Group, the municipal party committee and the municipal government asked for the turning point in the epidemic to be on the 17th and the level of zero Covid cases to be reached on the 20th (April)," Chen Jie said in his speech.
"This is a military order, there is no room for negotiation, we can only grit our teeth and fight the battle for victory. It can also be said that this is a total offensive, a last-ditch battle to reverse the trend of the epidemic," he added in his speech.
The Shanghai government and China's State Council did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Telephone contact with the Baoshan regional government could not be made today outside business hours.
Source: CNA
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