More than 11,000 recovered COVID-19 patients were discharged in Shanghai on Sunday, and health authorities emphasised that they must be allowed to return home despite the lockdown that has severely restricted movement in China’s largest city.“We hope their family and community will not worry about them or discriminate against them,” said Wu Jinglei, the director of the Shanghai municipal health commission.The city of 26 million people reported 1,006 confirmed infections and almost 24,000 asym

Some residents under lockdown in Shanghai say they are running out of food, amid the city's biggest-ever COVID outbreak.Residents are confined to their homes, banned from leaving for even essential reasons such as grocery shopping.Nearly 20,000 cases were reported on Thursday in China's biggest city – another near-record high.Officials have admitted the city is facing "difficulties" but say they are trying to improve this.

With little notice, officials imposed a lockdown on the city's more than 26 million residents.

Shanghai health officials on Monday defended separating babies and young children from their parents if they test positive for COVID-19, as frustration at the city's tough virus controls builds.Around 25 million people remain locked down in China's largest city and financial centre, as authorities try to snuff out the country's most severe virus outbreak since the end of the first pandemic wave in early 2020.Under China's unbending virus controls, anyone found positive – e

China reported 13,000 COVID cases on Sunday, the most since the peak of the first pandemic wave over two years ago, as health officials said they have found a suspected new subtype of the Omicron variant in the Shanghai area.China's "zero-COVID" strategy is under extreme pressure as the virus whips across the country.Until March, China had successfully kept the daily caseload down to double or triple digits, with hard, localised lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions.B

Nearly all of Shanghai's 25 million residents were under stay-at-home orders on Saturday, as parents raised fears of being separated from their children in the event of a positive COVID-19 test.The city, which is the epicentre of China's most severe COVID outbreak since the first months of the pandemic, has faced weeks of phased lockdowns.Authorities had vowed not to shut down the whole city, China's finance hub, but have conceded to rare failures in their attempts to control t

Shanghai has not declared any new COVID deaths in the city since the outbreak of the latest wave of the virus.But people working at the Donghai Elderly Care Hospital in the city's eastern Pudong area have described a dire situation and desperate attempts to help dozens of elderly patients, some of whom have died.A nurse said that the first positive cases were discovered at the facility – one of the biggest of its kind in Shanghai – three weeks ago.Since then, it has been sealed off, and

A top Shanghai official conceded Thursday the Chinese financial hub had been "insufficiently prepared" for its latest COVID outbreak, as criticism mounts over lockdowns that have caught residents off guard.The eastern megacity of 25 million has been split in two as part of a rolling lockdown plan to battle China's worst outbreak in two years.The spread of the Omicron variant is testing the country's zero-COVID strategy, which aims to crush virus clusters as soon as they em

Shanghai, China’s biggest city and financial capital, will be locked down in two phases over nine days, as authorities seek to lessen the economic disruption of its zero-tolerance approach to COVID-19. The city’s Pudong financial district and nearby areas – the section east of the Huangpu River that runs through Shanghai – will be locked down until Friday as residents are confined to their homes for mass testing.

Millions of people in China's financial hub were confined to their homes on Monday as the eastern half of Shanghai went into lockdown to curb the nation's biggest COVID outbreak.Authorities announced late on Sunday that it would carry out a two-phased lockdown of the city of around 25 million people to carry out mass testing.The government had sought to avoid the kind of hard lockdowns regularly deployed in other Chinese cities, opting instead for rolling localised lockdowns, in an