Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the two neighboring provinces of Shanghai, are offering quarantine rooms to support the city, which reported nearly 20,000 new local infections on Wednesday, in its fight against the latest COVID-19 resurgence.

The two provinces will provide 60,000 rooms to quarantine close contacts of COVID-19 infections from Shanghai soon, thepaper.cn reported, citing Shanghai's epidemic prevention and control headquarters.

Jiangsu and Zhejiang will each provide 30,000 quarantine rooms. So far, Jiangsu has provided 16,000 rooms in cities of Wuxi, Yangzhou, Changzhou, Suzhou, Zhenjiang, Taizhou, Yancheng and Nanjing, and Zhejiang has provided 21,000 rooms in Hangzhou, Ningbo, Taizhou, Shaoxing, Jinhua and Huzhou. The rest will be sourced in the coming days.

The rooms provided by the two provinces are all in hotels and other venues that meet epidemic prevention and control requirements.

All the secured rooms have made preparations based on management requirements of quarantine facilities and staffed with medical, cleaning and related workers.

The purpose of these rooms is to quarantine close contacts of COVID-19 infections from Shanghai. The first batch of the close contacts was transferred on Monday.

And all 16 districts of Shanghai have gotten in touch with cities in Jiangsu and Zhejiang to receive the transferred people and are orderly carrying out the transfer work.

Shanghai authorities require all the people involved in the transferring process, including the to-be-transferred patients, drivers of vehicles deployed for the transfer and other people aboard, have a negative nucleic acid test result within 24 hours before departure. They have to undergo a 14-day centralized quarantine free of charge. Vehicles deployed for trans-provincial transfers are required to maintain closed-loop management.

Eight groups of people, including the elderly, the underage, pregnant women, people with mobility issues, underlying health problems or mental diseases, will not be transferred.