The COVID-19 outbreak in China's largest metropolis of Shanghai remains 'extremely grim' amid an ongoing lockdown confining around 26 million people to their homes, a city official said Tuesday.
BEIJING -- The COVID-19 outbreak in China's largest metropolis of Shanghai remains "extremely grim" amid an ongoing lockdown confining around 26 million people to their homes, a city official said Tuesday.
Most of eastern Shanghai, which was supposed to reopen last Friday, remained locked down along with the western half of the city. Shanghai has reported more than 73,000 positive COVID-19 infections since the resurgence of the highly contagious Omicron variant in March. While China's vaccination rate hovers around 90%, its domestically produced inactivated virus vaccines are seen as weaker than the mRNA vaccines such as those produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna that are used abroad, as well as in the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macao. Vaccination rates among the elderly are also much lower than the population at large, with only around half of those over 80 fully vaccinated.
Gu said about 47,700 beds are available for COVID-19 patients, with another 30,000 beds to be ready soon. It wasn't clear how many beds were available for patients placed under observation, who number more than 100,000 according to city health authorities. At a virtual town hall Monday, the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai warned of possible family separations amid the lockdown, but said it had an "extremely limited ability" to intervene in such cases.
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