SHANGHAI (Reuters). Despite authorities trying to find and isolate asymptomatic illnesses, more than 1,000 COVID-19 cases were reported in Shanghai on Thursday.

Although Shanghai has a low number of Omicron cases, it is proving to be a test ground for China’s zero-COVID strategy.

The leaders of Shanghai’s Communist Party met Wednesday to discuss the importance of continuing testing, creating “closed loops” to reduce transmission and stopping new infections from occurring as quickly as possible.

According to the city, more districts will be held for testing on Thursday through Friday. This includes Lujiazui which is the financial center of Lujiazui. Residents are advised not to go home except when absolutely necessary.

Zhang Wenhong leads an expert team on COVID treatment for Shanghai. On Thursday, he said the city is struggling to find the right balance between its COVID response and the need to continue normal economic activities.

However, while the number of asymptomatic patients was increasing “exponentially”, the mass testing results suggest that the outbreak is now being effectively contained. He said this on his Weibo microblog (NASDAQ:), though there wasn’t yet an “inflection point”.

Zhang stated that some of the problems in these recent days need to be addressed one-by-one.

He said that “otherwise the importance of the successful battle against the epidemic would be greatly diminished” and added that maintaining normal city life should be as high a priority in future as “dynamic clearing”.

According to the National Health Commission, Shanghai had four newly transmitted symptoms on March 23, and 979 other asymptomatic infected cases.

On the same day there were 2054 confirmed cases of coronavirus in China, a decrease from the 2,667 reported a day before.

2.010 of the cases were localized, compared to 2,591 one day earlier. The majority occurred in Jilin, a northeastern province.

There were 2,829 new cases of asymptomatology, up from 2,469 the day before.

By March 23, there had been 139,285 confirmed cases in mainland China. No new deaths were reported, so the death rate was unchanged at 4,638 from one day before.