China adds 51 Covid-19 deaths, nearly 2,500 new cases in Shanghai

Beijing, Apr 25 (EFE).- At least 51 more people have lost their lives to the coronavirus in the eastern metropolis of Shanghai, the Chinese health authorities said Monday, bringing the total number of fatalities to 4,776 since the epidemic began in China.

The financial hub with 25 million residents has added 138 deaths since the authorities locked down the city more than a month ago after a sharp increase in infections despite the “zero-covid” strategy.

The country is experiencing an unprecedented wave of outbreaks attributed to the Omicron variant of the virus, causing record numbers of infections not seen since the pandemic in the first half of 2020.

The health commission said 2,680 people tested positive for the coronavirus in the past 24 hours from Sunday morning.

Of these, 2,666 are due to local contagion, while the rest are foreign travelers.

Shanghai added 2,472 infections, the highest number of community transmission cases.

The authorities said they detected 17,581 asymptomatic infections.

But the health authorities do not count such cases as confirmed Covid-19 infections unless they turn symptomatic.

The total number of active infections in mainland China has risen to nearly 29,178. Some 274 of them are in serious condition.

The National Health Commission said the country had accumulated 203,334 infections since the pandemic. Some 4,776 have succumbed to the disease.

Medical follow-up has been carried out on more than three million close contacts of the infected people, of which 435,378 are still under observation.

Frustrated by the strict lockdown in the largest city, residents have taken to social media to voice their mounting anger over the handling of the pandemic by the authorities despite a.

Protest videos have flooded the pages of the messaging app WeChat, the country’s most-popular.

On Saturday, a viral video, dubbed the Voices of April, showed black and white drone footage of Shanghai complete with statements from local authorities and the testimony of local inhabitants.

It begins with the voices of local politicians denying the possibility of a city-wide lockdown in late March, in particular due to the crucial economic role of Shanghai in China’s economy.

It is followed by fragments of conversations and testimonies detailing the issues that arose in medical care and the supply chain of basic goods, as well as the conditions in the state-run quarantine centers, where all but a few positive patients are sent.

WeChat’s censors began to remove the video from the social network, but users continued to upload it, sometimes flipping its perspective by 180 degrees to avoid detection. EFE

jco/ssk