Shanghai Residents Plead for Help Online as Daily Covid-19 Count Nears 20,000

Nearly a week into a citywide lockdown to combat a Covid-19 outbreak, many of Shanghai’s 25 million residents turned to social media for help to get food, medicine or, if they are taken away for quarantine, advice on what to do with their pets. Cases continued to rise, and neighboring provinces were preparing to take some of the overflow of Shanghai residents needing to go into quarantine. Shanghai reported nearly 20,000 new local infections Wednesday compared with a little over 17,000 the previous day, according to the city’s health commission. Over 98% of the new cases are asymptomatic, authorities said. Nationwide, the country reported almost 23,000 new cases. A top Chinese health official acknowledged that the Shanghai situation has “far exceeded what the capacity of the local medical system can handle.” In a post on his social-media account Thursday, Wu Zunyou, chief medical expert of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said that in theory a megacity should be able to bring community spread under control in 10-14 days with repeated rounds of mass testing.