Insight Bureau:  As Covid 19 cases continue to explode in China, the Chinese administration has imposed ‘stay at home’ orders on millions more people in the northeastern provinces. Around 26 million people in Shanghai remain locked down as Chinese authorities try to control the most severe coronavirus outbreak in the Asian nation since the initial lockdown in Wuhan at the start of 2020. The latest outbreak has put pressure on public health facilities and health care workers in the country’s largest city.

Shanghai has reported 17,077 new Covid cases in the last 24 hours, the biggest single-day spike.

Shanghai has converted multiple hospitals, gymnasiums, apartment blocks into quarantine sites. To control infection, Shanghai began a two stage lockdown on March 28, which has been extended to confine all of the city’s residents to their homes.

Authorities begun a city wide campaign to conduct RTPCR tests on all the residents. Furthermore, the government has deployed the military and thousands of health care workers to Shanghai to help carry out the tests. About 38,000 health care workers from provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and the capital Beijing have been dispatched to Shanghai.

Shanghai’s two international airports cancelled all flights and authorities banned outdoor activities. On Monday, a record number of 50 local transmitted Covid-19 symptomatic cases and 3,450 local asymptomatic infections amid this round of outbreak .