SHANGHAI extended a city-wide lockdown today, saying the rate of Covid infection in China’s biggest city remained “extremely grim.”

On Monday night authorities reported completing nucleic acid testing for all 26 million residents — the largest mass testing operation in the world so far — while 38,000 health workers from other areas were deployed to help handle the outbreak.

Once the full test results are analysed advice on whether to ease restrictions would be issued, but until then “citizens are asked to follow the current lockdown measures and stay in their homes except for medical and emergency situations,” said Shanghai working group on epidemic control director Gu Honghui.

The working group admitted that this was the biggest Covid outbreak yet in China, wider in scale than the initial Wuhan outbreak that brought the virus’s attention to the world in the winter of 2019-20, but reassured citizens that because of mass vaccination and the milder nature of the omicron variant it was not nearly so serious.

Shanghai is China’s financial capital and the world’s biggest seaport, shifting the largest volume of container traffic, as well as a major manufacturing centre, meaning prolonged lockdown could mean significant disruption to international trade and reinforce existing inflationary pressures across the globe.

The city has reported more than 73,000 positive cases since March, with 13,354 on Monday, figures far lower than current Covid infection rates in Britain, and the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic. No Shanghai resident has yet died from the virus.

But China has maintained a strict zero-Covid strategy that aims to isolate and eliminate all outbreaks. 

While critics argue this imposes a heavy economic and social cost, Chinese authorities say the policy is a reason China has lost just 11,800 lives to the virus or 8.5 per million — a death rate nearly 300 times lower than Britain’s. 

They add that the localised nature of lockdowns has actually seen economic activity affected less than in Western countries, meaning China was the only major economy not to shrink in 2020 and has grown faster than all others since.