Shanghai recorded its lowest daily number of new COVID-19 cases in more than three weeks as the municipal government pledged to ease restrictive measures while supporting manufacturing businesses to ramp up resumption of production.

The Chinese financial hub, home to 25 million people, reported 1,292 confirmed locally transmitted COVID-19 cases and 9,330 local asymptomatic carriers on Wednesday, marking its sixth consecutive day of declines, according to official figures.

The city government announced on Wednesday that residents living in areas that have zero COVID-19 community transmission are permitted limited mobility.

Since the adoption of phased closed-off management on March 28, the eastern Chinese megacity has reported more than 500,000 COVID-19 positive cases.

With the first three deaths related to COVID-19 reported on April 17, Shanghai has reported 285 COVID-19 deaths, including 47 deaths reported on Wednesday. All of the cases, mostly elderly and unvaccinated people, had underlying diseases.

To curb China's worst COVID-19 outbreak as quickly as possible, the city has conducted more than 200 million nucleic acid tests and set up more than 300,000 beds at 120 temporary hospitals, which are used to treat COVID-19 patients.

From Wednesday to Saturday, Shanghai will conduct another round of nucleic acid and antigen testing based on each compound's current risk level and the list of closed-off management, controlled and precautionary areas will be adjusted based on test results, said Zhao Dandan, deputy director of the Shanghai Health Commission.

"Large-scale nucleic acid tests are carried out round by round in a hope to quickly identify positive infections from the community and crowds, so as to control the source of infection and cut off virus transmission routes," said Zhao Jing, an official at the National Health Commission.

The Chinese mainland reported 1,494 locally transmitted cases and 9,864 new asymptomatic cases on Wednesday.

Apart from Shanghai, 16 other provincial-level regions on the mainland saw new local COVID-19 cases, including 56 in northeast China's Jilin Province, 48 in Beijing and 46 in east China's Zhejiang Province.