More than 11,000 people have walked out of hospitals or come out of medical observations since the latest wave of COVID-19 infections in eastern China's coastal metropolis Shanghai, local officials announced in a regular press release on Sunday.

Senior inspector of the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission Wu Qianyu said these people should not be forbidden from returning home.

The municipality reported nearly 25,000 locally transmitted COVID-19 infections on Saturday.

A total of 220,627 people in Shanghai were found to be close contacts, 178,437 of them are confirmed to be uninfected. The rest are waiting for test results.

More than 110,000 secondary close contacts were found to be uninfected.

Life supplies arrive

Local officials confirmed that life supplies started arriving in Shanghai on Sunday, including more than 80,000 units of baby care products, more than 100,000 units of medicine and pandemic control supplies, and 10 tonnes of mutton from northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The urgently needed supplies are being distributed to local families and temporary hospitals that host babies.

According to CMG reports, more supplies from Jiangsu and Tibet are being transported to Shanghai.

Executives for e-commerce giant JD.com and food delivery service Ele.me attended the daily briefing, saying that bottlenecks would ease.

Wang Wenbo, vice president of JD.com, said he understands concerns about delivery speed and that the company is focusing on basic foodstuffs and baby care items. Xiao Shuixian, senior vice president of Ele.me, said his company had brought in 2,800 more delivery workers over the past week.

New passport service back to normal

The "nucleic acid code" service introduced on Saturday was met with huge demand and became too slow to work. However, officials said the service had returned to normal by 2 p.m. on the same day.

"Peak requests reached 2 million times per minute," said Zhu Junwei, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Big Data Center. "We launched emergency procedures and expanded the hardware of the service to solve the problem."

Many elderly people said they found the code hard to use. Zhu said family members can get the code under their permission and the service will automatically verify the relations.

The rumor that ID numbers ending with the letter X cannot get the code has been proved false. The misinformation was spread by a local official by mistake.

Foreigner who just renewed their passports can use the "Suishenban" mobile app to re-verify their ID and get the new code.

(With input from agencies)