Shanghai ups the disinfection drive

Shanghai has developed guidelines on the disinfection of public settings and trained over 4 million professionals to enhance capabilities of environmental disinfection so as to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spreading during this current wave.

Over 1,200 local firefighters have joined the forces for city-wide disinfection, along with neighborhood committee members, social workers, volunteers and organizations from sister cities, including Hubei province's Wuhan, Gansu province's Lanzhou, and Jiangsu province's Nantong.

"We focus on environmental cleaning in quarantine facilities housing people infected with or exposed to COVID-19, as well as in major public settings, including construction sites, office buildings and supermarkets," said Liu Duo, the city's vice-mayor, at a news briefing on Monday.

Liu also reinforced the norms of medical waste disposal, which stipulates that infectious healthcare waste should be collected by professionals, put into yellow biohazard bags and transported by related departments to designated sites for disposal.

Shanghai reported 727 new locally transmitted COVID-19 confirmed cases and 6,606 asymptomatic infections on Sunday.

It also reported 32 fatalities due to COVID-19 on Sunday, with an average age of 84.1 years. So far there are 441 severe COVID-19 patients and 93 critically ill in the city.

According to Zhao Dandan, deputy director of the Shanghai municipal health commission, there are 2.76 million residents living in lockdown zones, 5.51 million in controlled zones and more than 15.14 million residents, or around 60 percent of the city's permanent population, living in precautionary zones since Sunday, based on the latest round of mass nucleic acid and antigen testing results.