A medical worker collects a smear sample from a child at a community Covid-19 test site in the Qiaoxi district of Shijiazhuang, capital of northern China’s Hebei province, on January 12, 2021. Shijiazhuang started the second round of nucleic acid tests for all residents.
Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
BEIJING – Mainland China reported on Thursday the first death of a new Covid-19 since May, while officials are trying to control an increase in cases outside Beijing.
A woman in Hebei province died on Wednesday afternoon, state media reported, noting that her illness was a serious case and she had pre-existing health problems.
The province surrounds Beijing and began to report a rapid increase in coronavirus cases earlier this month. In less than two weeks, authorities blocked Shijiazhuang and other parts of Hebei province in an effort to prevent the disease from spreading.
Hebei reported 81 new cases of coronavirus on Wednesday, bringing the number of current cases to 463. Heilongjiang Province reported 43 new confirmed cases on Wednesday.
The National Health Commission recorded Wednesday’s death in its daily report on the local status of the coronavirus, the first addition to the total number since May 2020.
This brought the total of coronavirus deaths from mainland China to 4,365 people. Covid-19’s first reported death was on January 11, 2020 in the city of Wuhan, where the disease first appeared in late 2019.
A team from the World Health Organization arrived in Wuhan on Thursday to investigate the origins of the virus alongside Chinese scientists, according to state media.
The Chinese government backed down against the implications that Covid-19 came from China. After the peak of the outbreak in the country at the beginning of last year, the authorities attributed the subsequent cases to foreign sources.