Medical workers collect water samples from residents at a community Covid-19 test site in Qiaoxi District in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province in northern China, on January 7, 2021.
Yang Shiyao | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
BEIJING – China on the mainland on Thursday reported the first new death of Covid-19 since May as authorities tried to control an increase in cases just outside Beijing.
A woman in Hebei province died on Wednesday afternoon, state media reported, noting that her illness was a serious matter and that she already had health conditions.
The province surrounds Beijing and began reporting a rapid increase in coronavirus cases earlier this month. In less than two weeks, authorities have shut down Shijiazhuang and other parts of Hebei Province in an effort to stop the spread of the disease.
Hebei reported 81 new coronavirus cases for Wednesday, bringing the number of current cases to 463. The northernmost province of Heilongjiang reported 43 newly confirmed cases for Wednesday.
The National Health Commission recorded Wednesday’s death in its daily report on the local coronavirus situation, the first addition to the overall toll since May 2020.
This brought the total deaths of the coronavirus on the continent to 4,365 people. The first reported death to Covid-19 was on January 11, 2020 in the city of Wuhan, where the disease only appeared in late 2019.
A team from the World Health Organization arrived in Wuhan on Thursday to investigate the origin of the virus with Chinese scientists.
The Chinese government has pushed back against the implications that Covid-19 came from China. Following the peak of the outbreak in the country early last year, authorities attributed the following matters to foreign sources.