COVID-19: Death toll in Shanghai rises to 17; cases begin to fall

Meanwhile, Shanghai started unlocking gradually in the backdrop of rising anger among the people.

China’s business hub Shanghai has reported seven more fatalities due to COVID-19, taking the death toll to 17 amidst signs of a declining trend in fresh cases, the health commission said on April 20.

The Chinese mainland on Tuesday reported 2,753 COVID-19 cases, of which 2,494 were in Shanghai, according to the National Health Commission’s report.

The country reported 17,166 asymptomatic cases with a majority of them in Shanghai, which was under a lockdown for over three weeks due to spiralling cases of the Omicron variant.

The city also reported seven more deaths on April 19, bringing the total number of fatalities to 17, according to the local health commission.

With this, the death toll in the country has reached 4,655 since coronavirus emerged in Wuhan in December 2019, according to the official data.

Apart from Shanghai, 14 other provincial-level regions in China saw new COVID-19 cases, including 133 in the northeastern Province of Jilin and two in Beijing, the commission report said.

It said that 30,773 people were undergoing treatment in hospitals across the country.