Fourth wave of Covid-19 in China: Army, health staff sent to Shangai to test all 26 million residents

New Delhi: Military personnel along with thousands of healthcare workers were sent to Shangai on Monday to conduct Covid-19 tests on all the 26 million residents, reported Reuters. This is supposedly one of the biggest ever public health responses.

The People`s Liberation Army (PLA) on Sunday dispatched more than 2,000 medical personnel recruited from across the army, navy and joint logistics support forces to Shanghai, an armed forces newspaper reported.

For this purpose, several residents were asked to wake up before dawn for nucleic acid testing at their housing compounds with many queuing up in their pyjamas.

Multiple provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Beijing have sent healthcare workers to Shanghai with some estimates putting the total number at more than 10,000.

This comes as China, which was the ground zero for the emergence of Coivd-19, reports another wave of coronavirus amid swiftly rising infections that led to lockdown in two of its key cities.

The mass-testing operation is China`s largest public health response since it tackled the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.

At the time of the Covid outbreak, only 4000 health workers were sent as against to this time.

Shanghai, which began a two-stage lockdown last Monday has now reached a stage of confining practically all residents to their homes.

The city on Sunday reported 8,581 asymptomatic Covid-19 cases and 425 symptomatic cases. It also asked residents to self-test using antigen tests.

While the outbreak is small by global standards, the city has emerged as a test of China`s elimination strategy based on testing, tracing and quarantining all positive cases and their close contacts.

Still, Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged the country to curb the momentum of the outbreak as soon as possible while sticking to the "dynamic-clearance" policy.

(With inputs from Reuters)