Medical team members gesture to encourage each other before leaving for Hubei Province in Kunming, capital of southwest China's Yunnan Province, Feb. 16, 2020. The fifth batch of 108 medical workers from Yunnan left for Hubei Province on Sunday to aid the novel coronavirus control efforts there. (Xinhua/Hu Chao)

Shanghai will deploy additional medical personnel at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, the designated hospital for COVID-19 patients, to reinforce treatment of patients in critical condition, the local authority said Friday.

Besides, the epidemic prevention and control mechanism in the outpatient and emergency rooms of local hospitals will also be strengthened to contain COVID-19 spread.

In addition, the city dispatched an expert team to the epidemic center Wuhan in Hubei Province on Monday morning, which will focus on the pathological analysis of the new novel coronavirus infection, Wenhui Daily reported.

The team includes six experts from the School of Medicine at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the affiliated Ruijin Hospital, who are well-versed in the field of pathology and medical imaging.

Chinese pathologists have concluded autopsies of the bodies of two COVID-19 patients at the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital on Sunday, with the consent of the relatives of the deceased.

The Shanghai expert team will study the etiology of COVID-19 cases and how the disease develops to find new clues for clinical diagnosis and further researches.

The team received training on high-level protection on Sunday afternoon to reduce the potential risk of infection.

As of Monday morning, 161 among the 331 patients in Shanghai have recovered, making the city's COVID-19 rate of recovery to nearly 50 percent, according to media reports.