A Shanghai hospital conducts COVID-19 testing on its staffers on January 21, 2021. Photo: Yang Hui/GT

Shanghai found six local confirmed COVID-19 cases in its most populous downtown Huangpu district on Thursday, two months since the last local case was reported in the city, local health authority said on Friday.

The city has so far traced 74 close contacts of the six patients, and 15,073 people who might have come into contact with them or had overlapping travel histories, according to the Shanghai Health Commission's latest information release on Friday morning.

All these people tested negative for COVID-19, the commission said. The city has placed the patients' close contacts under centralized quarantine for medical observation, it said.

The local sites that the patients had recently been have been disinfected, according to the commission.

All the six new cases are located in Huangpu district, one of Shanghai's most populous areas in the city.

Case 1 tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday afternoon during a regular nucleic acid testing at their workplace, and was later confirmed as infected the next day. Case 2 and 3 are a friend and neighbor of case 1, according to the commission.

Case 5 is a returned overseas Chinese student who was temporarily living in the hotel that Case 2 works at in Huangpu, said the commission.

Case 4, who also lives in Huangpu district, is a relative of case 3; Case 6 works in Huangpu and is a colleague of case 2, the commission said.

Shanghai also found three imported COVID-19 cases from overseas on Thursday, all Chinese nationals flying in from the US, Switzerland and India, the commission said on Friday morning.

Global Times