COVID-19 tally continues to rise in Shanghai

The number of new COVID-19 infections continued to rise in Shanghai as the city reported 758 new infections, including 24 confirmed cases, on Sunday, the municipal government announced on Monday.

Of the newly reported confirmed cases on Sunday, 22 were previously asymptomatic infections. Two other new confirmed cases and 652 asymptomatic infections were close contacts of the previous infections, and the others were found through screening of people with risk of contracting the virus.

As of the end of Sunday, the latest COVID-19 outbreak, which started at the beginning of March, has resulted in more than 3,000 infections in the city, including 209 confirmed cases.

Wu Jinglei, the director of the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, said at a media briefing on Monday that the city will continue its grid-screening plan over the upcoming days.

He said that the city has conducted more than 30 million nucleic acid tests during the grid-screening process from last Wednesday to Sunday.

"Data analysis has shown that the positive detection rate in medium-risk grids is significantly higher than that in low-risk ones. There are currently infection clusters in some communities," said Wu.

"As such, we've delineated the scopes of a new round of nucleic acid screening and will carry out follow-up nucleic acid tests and prevention control work in those grids which have been placed under closed-loop management," he said.