Shanghai tried to reassure the public yesterday amid worries of another lockdown after the city of 26 million people on China’s east coast reported a record 981 new Covid infections overnight.

As residents scramble to ensure they have the essentials, grocery websites have run out of stock and shop shelves have been empty.

“You all have noticed that the daily number [of new infections] has been high in recent days, and Shanghai is faced with its most serious challenge,” Wu Jinglei, the director of the city’s health commission, said yesterday.

“But we also hope you won’t believe rumours, won’t spread rumours and especially won’t fabricate rumours maliciously.”

Separately, the city’s media bureau has refuted claims of an impending lockdown, blaming misinformation.

The extremely contagious Omicron strain has put China’s zero-infection program to the test. Since March 1, the country has reported 45,000 incidents, pushing small towns to implement additional curfews. Shenzhen, a tech powerhouse in the country’s south, shut down all public transportation last week.

The number of infections in Shanghai has been increasing on a daily basis, raising fears that the country’s financial center may be closed down. For the time being, the city has only blocked off residential areas where positive cases have been confirmed.

The majority of cases recorded in Shanghai are asymptomatic. There were no symptoms in 977 of the most recent 981 new cases.

Yesterday, Hong Kong reported 12,240 new cases and 205 Covid-related deaths. The fifth wave has so far infected more than 1 million people across the 7.4 million-person state, but a simulation model developed by the University of Hong Kong (HKU) suggests that up to 4.4 million people may have already been infected.

It is estimated that the daily number could fall to fewer than 1,000 by late April, when the Hong Kong government plans to relax social-distancing rules.

The dean of HKU’s college of medicine, Gabriel Leung, urged that the city label the pandemic as “endemic” and use “mixed immunity” to deal with the virus.

Hong Kong’s chief medical and health officer, Albert Au, said the government would keep to its zero-infection policy.

“For now, we see the daily number remaining at a high level, and it’s very difficult to predict precisely how it will develop in the future,” Au said.

The city has no imminent plans to perform mass testing, instead of focusing on treating the very ill and lowering mortality rates. Several major international corporations have shut down as a result of the new Covid lockdowns. Both Toyota and Volkswagen have ceased operations.

For the first time since the pandemic began, all 24 million citizens of the province of Jilin in China’s north-east have been quarantined.

One of China’s challenges is that the country’s two indigenous vaccines do not work as well as western mRNA vaccines, and the country has relied on very few foreign alternatives.

It is especially concerning that China, a country of 1.4 billion people, has failed to protect its most vulnerable citizens, with half of those over the age of 80 still unvaccinated at the start of the Omicron wave.

However, both Chinese vaccines, like the Oxford AstraZeneca shots, may be stored in a standard fridge. Since the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines must be stored at -20 degrees Celsius, they are more valuable to developing countries with limited resources.

Last year, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that one of the Chinese vaccines, Sinovac, was 87% effective in preventing severe Covid-19 and 86% successful in preventing mortality. According to the WHO, the other Chinese vaccine, Sinopharm, was 79% successful in lowering hospital admissions.

Indonesia will relax a two-year prohibition on domestic travel during the Muslim holiday season of Eid al-Fitr in early May, President Joko Widodo announced yesterday.

Millions of people regularly go to see their families for Eid al-Fitr, and the decision to allow the annual exodus after Ramadan is the latest action aimed at loosening Covid-19 restrictions and revitalizing Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

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