As China's daily COVID-19 cases reached a record high on Friday, the country is struggling to manage growing public displeasure over the Covid-Zero policy in Shanghai.
Residents of one of the country's biggest cities and a global financial hub have started protesting against lockdown orders which have stretched in some instances to a month, according to media reports.
Chinese experts believe that though Shanghai's epidemic scale is bigger than the previous Wuhan outbreak, its severity is lower in comparison, state media tabloid Global Times reported.
Local health authorities from Shanghai attributed the city's surge in infections to the expansion of the range of mass screening.
"The number of positive cases reported today has increased compared with the numbers of the previous two days because we screened more widely," Wu Qianyu, an official from Shanghai Municipal Heath Commission, said during a press conference on Saturday.
Due to the "zero-Covid" policy, medical systems can be quickly overwhelmed by the requirements to isolate all positive cases -- regardless of their severity.
These several COVID measures have had the unintended consequence of putting the health of vulnerable people at risk, as health authorities try to protect the country against a massive outbreak.
The Covid infection in a city hospital where the COVID crisis is unfolding, infection is majorly spreading among the older population and people are continuously losing their lives for the past three days.
China's largest city has exposed the elderly, a vulnerable group in the country, the New York Times reported.
Two attendants at the Shanghai Donghai Elderly Care Hospital in interviews said that the coronavirus was spreading widely among the mostly older patients in the facility, and that people had died in each of the past three days.
The two spoke on the condition of anonymity as they feared losing their jobs. With the rise of the highly transmissible Omicron variant in China, the country is struggling to keep up with the rising covid cases.
( With inputs from ANI )
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