An elderly woman receives a nucleic acid test in March in Shanghai. Photo: VCG

Shanghai on Tuesday reported seven more COVID-19 patient deaths all involving elderly people who haven't received COVID-19 vaccines, making the total number up to 10 amid this around of Omicron outbreak, according to the Shanghai health authorities. 

The seven local fatalities were aged between 60 and 101, including six aged above 75 years old, with underlying diseases such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and other diseases, Wu Qianyu, an official from the Shanghai health authority said at Tuesday's press briefing.

The seven patients' symptoms worsened when they were admitted in hospital, and the direct causes of their deaths were underlying diseases, Wu said.

Shanghai on Monday registered 3,084 local COVID-19 cases and 17,332 local asymptomatic infections. From February 26 to Monday, the city has reported 27,613 local confirmed cases and has 21,717 hospitalized patients (including 21 in a critical condition), said the authorities on Tuesday.

Nucleic acid screening is one of the most important measures to quickly detect, put COVID-19 infected people into quarantine and effectively cut off the transmission routes and treat those patients in a timely manner, Shanghai Executive Vice Mayor Wu Qing said at Tuesday's press briefing. Wu is by far the highest ranking city official to attend the regular news briefing.

Wu Qing also apologized saying that the adjustment on the nucleic acid screening process has brought inconvience to community workers and residents and vowed to improve related work and improve screening quality and efficiency. The results of each round of screening will provide further data support to dynamically adjust the epidemic prevention and control strategies in the next step. 

Since April 15, more than 37 million nucleic acid samplings have been completed. The city will continue to take nucleic acid tests in regions under lock down for three consecutive days and will start a new round of tests in the other two kinds of regions under "control" and "precaution" starting from Wednesday, according to Wu.

On Monday, 1,211 confirmed COVID-19 patients and 22,075 asymptomatic carriers were discharged from hospital and released from medical observations. The number of discharged people has exceeded the newly infected persons on Monday, Wu Qianyu said, noting that the corresponding communities should ensure a smooth mechanism to let them return home safely.

Shanghai also issued a digital manual involving 100 questions about COVID-19 covering the basic knowledge and related health information to guide residents to improve the personal protection awareness and ability.