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January 15, 2021

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China reports first COVID-19 death since May

China reported its biggest jump in COVID-19 cases in more than 10 months as infections in northeastern Heilongjiang Province nearly tripled.

The National Health Commission said in a statement that 138 new COVID-19 cases were reported on January 13, up from 115 cases a day earlier and marking the highest jump since March 5 last year.

China also reported one new death, the first since mid-May.

The commission said the case in question was a female patient with pre-existing health problems. She died on Wednesday afternoon.

The northern Hebei Province accounted for 81 of the 124 local infections, 75 were in the provincial capital Shijiazhuang, while Heilongjiang reported 43 such cases a day after it declared a state of emergency, most of them centered on the city of Suihua outside the provincial capital of Harbin. More than 28 million people are already in lockdown as the two provinces try to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

On the bright side, 12 COVID-19 patients were discharged from Hebei Chest Hospital and 18 asymptomatic carriers completed a concentrated medical observation on their health conditions yesterday.

The patients, the first batch discharged during the ongoing coronavirus outbreak in Hebei, left the isolation ward and received flowers and greetings from medical workers at the hospital at 1pm. By the end of Wednesday, there were 463 locally transmitted confirmed cases and two imported cases in hospitals in Hebei. The provincial health commission said that all patients receive customized treatments and daily consultations from a team of medical experts.

Unlike many of the outbreaks China saw in 2020, the hardest hit areas by the latest spike of infections have been more sparsely populated counties and remote villages.

Authorities in Shijiazhuang, which already imposed a lockdown, are placing residents of rural and remote villages in the city’s jurisdiction under centralized observation and building quarantine facilities in the latest bid to close gaps in their control measures.

“A village may have dozens or even hundreds of households,” NHC official Tong Zhaohui told state television explaining the need for such centralized quarantine.

“People in the village can still communicate with each other if you just sealed the entrance of the village,” Tong added. “So we must find a suitable place for centralized quarantine. This also aims to avoid more infections.”

Ma Shaohai, a project manager with China Railway 14th Bureau Group, said after receiving the order for the construction project at 11am on Wednesday, the company mobilized more than 100 people. They were aided by dozens of types of machinery to carry out the work.

The isolation center will likely cover 33 hectares of area near a village in Zhengding County, Shijiazhuang. It will have 3,000 makeshift wards.

Authorities in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region said they have discovered the novel coronavirus in environmental samples from a local hospital.




 

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