China Locked Down 4 Cities & Reported Its First COVID-19 Death in 8 Months

It’s been around a year since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Which, honestly, might’ve felt longer to some with all the lockdowns and circuit breakers.

But how has China, the country which the virus originated from, been handling it?

Well, if you look at the stats, pretty well. Outside of the first few months, they’ve generally kept the virus cases under control.

However, recent reports have shown that virus cases and death toll have started going up.

China Locked Down 4 Cities & Reported Its First COVID-19 Death in 8 Months

It’s never a good look when new cases happen.

On 14 Jan, Thursday, a COVID-19 related death has been reported in China.

This comes after eight months without a case of death, along with 138 new cases, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.

Among them, 124 are said to be local cases.

81 of which were reported in Hebei province surrounding Beijing, which is also where the new case of death occurred. The remaining 43 came from north-eastern Heilongjiang province.

The news also comes at a rather unfortunate period, which is just a few weeks off Chinese New Year.

That being said, many places have since discouraged people from travelling unless it was really needed.

Cities Under Lockdown

Currently, China has several cities under lockdown.

They are Shijiazhuang, Xingtai, Langfang and Heilongjiang.

Shijiazhuang began their lockdown last week, closing off schools and preventing people from leaving the city.

They also set up around 5,000 test sites to ensure as many people as possible get tested. Xingtai and Langfeng have also been on lockdown since Friday, 8 Jan, accounting for a total of 12 million people.

Heilongjiang, as of Wednesday, has also been placed into emergency lockdown. Many cases have sprung up from the Wangkui county which went into lockdown on Monday.

Beijing is also one of the cities, and authorities have also started being more vigilant in trying to curb the virus, with health screenings and implementing more measures.

This includes a nucleic acid test for people like taxi drivers every week, as well as making vaccination mandatory for them.

As of this writing, China has a total of 87,844 COVID-19 cases along with 4,635 deaths.

Not sure about you, but do you sense a deja vu here?

WHO Investigating Origin Of Virus

Around this time, it’s also been reported that WHO has also sent a team of 10 to Wuhan, where the outbreak first began.

The team will spend two weeks in quarantine and the following two conducting their research on the virus.

Peter Ben Embarek, who is leading then 10, mentions that it’ll take time to fully understand all the nuances of the virus.

However, the aim is also to “get a better understanding of what happened.”

A top emergency expert at WHO also said that they were looking for answers that could potentially save many, and would go to lengths to find the virus’ origins.

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