(Bloomberg) --
The Shanghai government urged the city's elderly residents to make sure they are fully vaccinated and to get booster shots once the city's lockdown is lifted.
Only 62% of residents aged 60 or older had received two shots of Covid-related vaccines as of April 15, Wu Jinglei, director of the Shanghai Heath Commission, said at a briefing Sunday. Of these, 38% have had booster jabs, Wu said.
The risks from the omicron variant of coronavirus for unvaccinated elderly people are high, based on the monitoring of domestic and overseas cases, with patients displaying severe, critical and in some cases fatal symptoms, Wu said.
Older people with diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure can get vaccinated as long as they are taking their routine medicines and their symptoms are stable, he said.
Shanghai has reported 16 Covid cases with severe symptoms in the latest outbreak, 15 of whom are aged 70 years or older and most of them are unvaccinated and have “serious” chronic diseases.
City officials recorded 24,820 local Covid-19 infections for Saturday, 21,582 of them asymptomatic. While the case count is still “fairly high,” the ratio of infections detected among potentially risky people has fallen, Wu said.
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