Coronavirus: Shanghai adds 17,007 new Covid-19 cases, setting a daily record for the fifth straight day as city undergoes more tests

Shanghai added 17,007 new Covid-19 infections on Wednesday, setting a daily record for the fifth consecutive day since a worsening of the outbreak forced China’s financial and commercial hub to go into a citywide lockdown last week.

Authorities kept the city of 25 million residents locked down for the second week, after mass testing found more than 94,000 infections since March 1. The local government reversed its earlier plan of ending the lockdown on April 5 on Puxi, the area west of the Huangpu River that divides the city into halves.

The vast majority of the infected cases showed no symptoms of illness, with 16,766 asymptomatic, while 311 of the infected showed symptoms, according to the Shanghai public health commission. The single-day infection number also beat the nation’s previous all-time high of 13,436 cases recorded in Wuhan on February 12, 2000, where the coronavirus outbreak originated.

Shanghai’s municipal government started a new round of mass testing on Wednesday morning to spot infections and the transmission chain after studying the results of a three-day mass testing exercise from Sunday to Tuesday, according to a document seen by the Post, that did not disclose the number of infections from the earlier tests.