Medical workers are seen before setting out for Shanghai at Nanchang Railway Station in Nanchang, east China's Jiangxi Province, April 3, 2022. A team of medical workers left Jiangxi Province Sunday for Shanghai to help aid the COVID-19 control efforts there. Photo: Xinhua

At least 38,000 medical workers from across China have been deployed to aid Shanghai as of Monday in the fight against the Omicron variant, the largest number of nationwide medical aid since Wuhan in early 2020.

A total of 15 province-level regions have sent medical teams to help Shanghai to combat the city's worst outbreak since 2020, according to Chinese media reports.

Most of the medical staff that have arrived in Shanghai will help with the mass nucleic acid testing, while others will help ease the burden on staff at makeshift hospitals. 

The city of 25 million people started the city-wide nucleic acid testing on Monday, the largest exercise of its kind in any city in China or globally. 

Shanghai on Monday reported 425 confirmed and 8,581 asymptomatic domestically transmitted cases, the highest daily increases since the latest outbreak, bringing the total number of COVID-19 infections in the city to over 60,000.

More than 36,000 medical staff are from regions including East China's Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, and Shandong provinces, South China's Guangdong and Hainan provinces, Central China's Henan, Hunan and Hubei provinces, Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, and North China's Tianjin and Beijing. Jiangsu sent the biggest medical team of around 13,000 medical staff, followed by Zhejiang with 8,700.

In addition, China's military authorities on Sunday dispatched more than 2,000 medical staff to Shanghai, according to the Chinese People's Liberation Army Daily. The medical staff were drawn from seven medical units affiliated with the army, navy and joint logistics support force. 

In early 2020, more than 42,000 medical personnel from across China were sent to Wuhan to aid local medical staff to treat patients and contain the spread of the virus.

Global Times