Shanghai's largest makeshift virus hospital comes into use

Shanghai's largest makeshift hospital, built inside the city's National Exhibition and Convention Center, began to receive COVID-19 patients on Saturday. The converted arena is expected to offer 50,000 beds when fully in use.

Shanghai has built over 100 temporary hospitals to treat COVID-19 patients with over 160,000 beds. The city has locked down its 26 million people and carried out repeated mass testing to tackle an outbreak driven by the highly contagious omicron BA.2 variant.

More than 23,000 new local cases, of which only 1,015 had symptoms, were reported on Saturday. Shanghai vice Mayor said the lockdown could soon be lifted or eased in communities that report no positive cases within 14 days, after another round of citywide COVID-19 testing.