Medical personnel collect swab samples from residents at a Covid-19 test site in the Qiaoxi District of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province in northern China, January 7, 2021.
Yang Shiyao | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
BEIJING – Mainland China reported the first new Covid-19 death since May on Thursday as authorities try to contain a spike in business just outside Beijing.
A woman in Hebei Province died Wednesday afternoon, state media reported, noting that her illness was a serious case and that she had pre-existing health problems.
The province surrounds Beijing and began reporting a rapid increase in coronavirus cases earlier this month. In less than two weeks, authorities detained Shijiazhuang and other parts of Hebei Province in an effort to prevent the spread of the disease.
Hebei reported 81 new cases of coronavirus on Wednesday, bringing the number of current cases to 463. The northernmost province of Heilongjiang reported 43 new confirmed cases on Wednesday.
The National Health Commission recorded Wednesday’s death in its daily report on the local coronavirus situation, the first addition to the total toll since May 2020.
That brought the total coronavirus deaths from mainland China to 4,365 people. The first reported death from Covid-19 was on January 11, 2020 in the city of Wuhan, where the disease first emerged in late 2019.
A team from the World Health Organization arrived in Wuhan on Thursday to work with Chinese scientists to investigate the origin of the virus, state media said.
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 cases to foreign sources.