Free Republic

Shanghai, the global financial hub and China’s biggest city, has become the epicentre of COVID-19 cases in the country as it set a record of six-straight days of logging around 20,000 cases, as the city ramped up mass testing to tackle the rapid spread of the Omicron variant. The Chinese mainland reported 1,284 new locally-transmitted COVID-19 cases, including 322 in Shanghai, on Wednesday, China’s National Health Commission reported on Thursday. Wednesday also saw 21,784 new asymptomatic cases, including 19,660 in Shanghai, it said. Shanghai with a population of about 26 million, which remained under lockdown for several days, has already...

NEW YORK (AP) — Omicron has raced ahead of other variants and is now the dominant version of the coronavirus in the U.S., accounting for 73% of new infections last week, federal health officials said Monday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers showed nearly a six-fold increase in omicron’s share of infections in only one week. In much of the country, it’s even higher. Omicron is responsible for an estimated 90% or more of new infections in the New York area, the Southeast, the industrial Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. The national rate suggests that more than 650,000...

BEND, Ore. (AP) — The death toll from COVID-19 in Oregon is climbing so rapidly in some counties that the state has organized delivery of one refrigerated truck to hold the bodies and is sending a second one, the state emergency management department said Saturday.So far, Tillamook County, on Oregon’s northwest coast, and Josephine County, in the southwest, requested the trucks, said Bobbi Doan, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Office of Emergency Management.

Once again, more Pennsylvania counties are showing substantial spread of the coronavirus, Gov. Tom Wolf’s office said Monday. Across Pennsylvania, 50 of the state’s 67 counties have substantial transmission of COVID-19, Wolf’s office said. That’s an additional five counties compared to last week, when the Wolf administration said 45 counties showed substantial transmission of COVID-19. The positive test rate rose to 9.5% for the week of April 2-8, which represents a slight increase from 9.4% the previous week. It is the fourth straight week the positive rate has risen, but the uptick is much smaller than in previous weeks. At...