Nearly after six months, the capital city Beijing recorded its first COVID-19 case on Wednesday, as China grapples with the spread of the Delta variant of the virus following an outbreak linked to an airport in the eastern city of Nanjing, according to media reports.

According to the National Health Commission (NHC), China recorded 49 new cases on Wednesday taking the total number of cases associated with the new cluster to at least 175, CNN reported.

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Earlier, on Tuesday, the country recorded 86 cases, its highest single-day spike since January this year. Although China has had more than a year of low case numbers and resumed daily life, recently the virus’ spread across provincial borders is sparking alarm among the country’s leaders. 

On Thursday, a second new case of coronavirus was also reported in Beijing on Thursday afternoon, with health authorities describing the two local cases as a husband and wife who had recently travelled to a city in Hunan province that has been linked to the latest outbreak.

Close contacts of the couple have been placed in quarantine.

The coronavirus was initially discovered in late 2019 in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, and it quickly spread across China and the rest of the world. Despite being the first country to be infected with the virus, China has subsequently been able to control its spread.

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Since March 2020, official case numbers have remained low, and flare-ups have been rapidly handled with mass testing and harsh restrictions, including nationwide lockdowns of hundreds of millions of people.

The latest epidemic, however, offers a new concern, with the more transmissible Delta form discovered in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province’s capital and a significant industrial and transportation hub with a population of about 9.3 million people.