Some residents woke up before dawn to put white workers’ uniforms around their necks as part of the nucleic acid test in their home units, many queued up in their pajamas and stood the required two meters apart. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on Sunday sent more than 2,000 medical personnel from across the military, navy and joint logistical support forces to Shanghai, a military newspaper reported. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register More than 10,000 healthcare workers from provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and the capital Beijing have arrived in Shanghai, according to state media, who showed them arriving loaded with suitcases and covered by high-speed trains and planes. . It is the biggest public health response in China since it faced the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, where the new coronavirus was first discovered in late 2019. The State Council said the PLA sent more than 4,000 medical personnel to Hubei Province, where Wuhan is, at that time. Shanghai, which launched a two-stage lockdown on March 28, which was extended to confine almost all residents to their homes, reported 8,581 asymptomatic COVID-19 cases and 425 symptomatic COVID-19 cases as of April 3. He also asked the residents to do a self-check on Sunday. The city has emerged as a test of China’s COVID-19 eradication strategy based on testing, detecting and quarantining all positive cases and their close contacts. The exercise in China’s most populous city took place on the eve when Shanghai initially said it planned to lift the city’s lockdown. The country has 12,400 institutions capable of testing up to 900 million people a day, a senior Chinese health official said last month. China’s mainly uses pool tests, a process in which up to 20 coating samples are mixed together for faster processing. The city has also converted many hospitals, gyms, apartment buildings and other venues into quarantine centers, including the Shanghai New International Expo Center, which can accommodate 15,000 full-capacity patients. On Monday, some residents said they received their results in their personal health application just over four hours after being given a swab in the morning. But in other parts of the city, some said they had not yet been notified when their tests would take place. COMMON DISAPPOINTMENT The increase in state support for Shanghai comes as the city faces the demands of the country’s “dynamic cleanup” strategy, with some residents complaining about busy and unhealthy quarantine centers, as well as difficulties in securing food and necessary medical care. Some have begun to question the policies, asking why children with COVID-19 are separated from their parents and why mild or asymptomatic infections – the majority of cases in Shanghai – cannot be isolated at home. read more On Monday, Shanghai official Wu Qianyu told a news conference that children could be accompanied by their parents if their parents were infected, but separated if they were not infected, adding that policies were still improving. A Shanghai resident, who declined to be named for reasons of secrecy, told Reuters he was taken to a central quarantine unit on Sunday night after reporting a positive self-test more than a week ago. Another antigen test on Saturday showed he was no longer infected, but authorities insisted on sending him to quarantine, where he has been placed in an apartment where he has to share the toilet with two other patients, who are still positive. “How is this isolation?” he said, adding that he was now afraid of becoming infected again. “I’m not in the mood to do anything right now, I can not sleep.” On Monday, videos released on the WeChat messaging app showed many people rushing to get bedding and supplies from the dirty floor of what the poster said was a quarantine center still filled with construction materials. Reuters could not independently verify the video. EMPLOYEES UNDER PRESSURE The pressure on the city’s health workers and members of the Communist Party was also high, as they worked around the clock to manage the city’s lockdown and deal with residents’ frustrations. Photos and videos have gone viral on Chinese social media with exhausted workers and volunteers sleeping in plastic chairs or on the grass outside homes or being applauded by residents. On Saturday, the Pudong Chinese Disease Control Center said it was investigating a call recording leak between a staff member and a patient’s relative who was confused by the results of his father’s COVID test. The CDC staff member, who was recognized by local media as an infectious disease specialist, was heard angrily saying she had expressed concerns about current quarantine and testing rules. Reuters was unable to independently verify the recording. Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged the country to reduce the dynamics of the epidemic as soon as possible, while adhering to a “dynamic clean-up” policy. read more On Saturday, Deputy Prime Minister Sun Chunlan, who was sent to Shanghai by the central government, urged the city to “take decisive and swift action” to contain the pandemic. The eastern city of Suzhou said it had spotted a version of the Omicron BA.1.1 sub-variant that did not match any other in the domestic or international GISAID variant monitoring database, state television said. The state-backed Science and Technology Daily said it remained unclear whether the virus was a new subset of Omicron and that the emergence of one or two new versions was normal given Omicron’s spread in China, citing an unknown national. database. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Report by Brenda Goh, David Kirton and the Shanghai Newsroom. Editing by Stephen Coates, Gerry Doyle and Raju Gopalakrishnan Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
