A medical worker collects a swab sample from a child at a Covid-19 community test site in Qiaoxi District of Shijiazhuang, the capital of northern China’s Hebei Province, on January 12, 2021. Shijiazhuang began a second round of nucleic acid testing for all residents.
Xinhua News Agency Getty Images
BEIJING – Mainland China on Thursday reported the first new Covid-19 death in May, as authorities try to control an increase in cases just outside Beijing.
A woman from Hebei province died on Wednesday afternoon, state media reported, noting that her illness was a serious case and that she had pre-existing health conditions.
The province surrounds Beijing and began reporting a rapid increase in coronavirus cases earlier this month. In less than two weeks, authorities closed 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 current number of cases to 463. The northernmost province of Heilongjiang reported 43 new 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 May 2020 total.
This led to the total death of the coronavirus in mainland China to 4,365 people. The first death reported by Covid-19 was on January 11, 2020 in the city of Wuhan, where the disease first appeared at the end of 2019.
A team from the World Health Organization arrived in Wuhan on Thursday to investigate the origins of the virus with Chinese scientists, according to state media.
The Chinese government has pushed back against the implications that Covid-19 came from China. After the outbreak in the country at the beginning of last year, the authorities attributed the subsequent cases to foreign sources.