Shanghai residents leave hotel quarantine

After completing 14 days of hotel quarantine, more than 1,700 residents of downtown Shanghai's Zhaotong Road residential neighborhood started to head home on Thursday.

About 300 were expected to arrive home on Thursday evening, with the rest to be transferred on Friday, officials said.

The neighborhood, comprising mostly old houses with insufficient bathrooms and kitchens, was removed from a list of medium-risk regions for the spread of the novel coronavirus at 6 pm Thursday.

Dozens of volunteers and nursing care providers were dispatched to the neighborhood and wheelchairs were prepared for elderly residents.

Seniors, mothers with infants in arms or toddlers walking hand in hand were escorted home by volunteers after they disembarked from vans or buses.

Some were even accompanied by pet dogs because when the residents were transferred to hotels for quarantine on Jan 21, the first day that Shanghai reported it latest cluster of locally transmitted COVID-19 infections, they were allowed to take their pets with them.

Shanghai announced on Thursday that three new local COVID-19 cases had been recorded on Wednesday, but experts said the wave of infection since Jan 21 remains controllable because all the cases have been within virus transmission routes detected by disease control and prevention personnel.

Twenty-one cases have been reported in Shanghai since Jan 21.

The Shanghai Municipal Health Commission said the three new infections were among close or suspected contacts of previously confirmed patients. Two of them were placed under hotel quarantine on Jan 21 and the other was placed under centralized quarantine on Jan 22.

Wu Fan, a member of Shanghai's COVID-19 epidemic control and prevention public health expert team, said all the cases occurred among people placed under quarantine and had been discovered through proactive screening and testing.

"They have obvious epidemiological relationships with the previous cases and are not new individual cases from nowhere," said Wu, who is vice-dean of Fudan University Shanghai Medical College. "This shows that the risk of the current wave of epidemic is still controllable."

The health commission said residents from the Zhaotong Road residential neighborhood who are related to the new cases will continue their centralized quarantine.

Renji Hospital's west campus will resume outpatient clinic services on Monday and the Shanghai Cancer Center Affiliated with Fudan University will follow suit on Tuesday, the medical institutions announced on Thursday.

The cancer center said on Jan 20 that an outsourced logistics worker at the hospital returned a suspicious test result for novel coronavirus during a regular test of staff members.

The next day, Renji Hospital said a logistics worker there had also returned a suspicious test result. The two men and a friend of one of them were the first cases in the current wave of infection.

The Chinese mainland recorded 30 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, including 17 locally transmitted ones, the National Health Commission said on Thursday.

Of the locally transmitted cases, eight were reported in Jilin province, four in Heilongjiang province, three in Shanghai, and two in Hebei province, the commission said.

There were 135 COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals on Wednesday following their recovery, it said.

Xinhua contributed to this story.