Shanghai neighborhood locked down due to COVID-19

A residential neighborhood on Zhangdong Road in Shanghai's Pudong district has been designated a medium-level risk area and locked down after a resident was found to be infected with COVID-19, the municipal government announced on Wednesday.

The neighborhood will also undergo closed-loop management for 14 days.

Six locally transmitted confirmed COVID-19 cases and two asymptomatic cases have been reported in Shanghai over the past two weeks. All confirmed cases had traveled outside Shanghai.

The latest case is a 30-year-old man who tested positive on Tuesday after Shanghai authorities acceded to the request from another city to locate the close contacts of a confirmed case.

As of 8 am Wednesday, the city's disease prevention workers had traced the 41 close contacts, 89 secondary close contacts, and more than 11,200 individuals related to this case in Shanghai. Their first nucleic acid tests all returned negative.

"We would like to remind the public not to leave Shanghai for unnecessary reasons," Wu Jinglei, director of the Shanghai Health Commission, said during the news conference on Wednesday.

"As New Year's Day and the Spring Festival are approaching, the city government is mandating that institutions cancel or delay gatherings and meetings. They can opt to move meetings online," he added.

Wu Huanyu, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said that more than 27 million people in the city have been vaccinated as of Tuesday. In addition, more than 3.46 million residents have received their booster shots since the city started offering them on Nov 1.

"Shanghai's current key task is to encourage more people aged between 3 and 17, as well as the elderly aged 60 or older, to be inoculated," said Wu.