China reports no new local COVID-19 cases for first time since July

China’s health authority reported on Monday that there were no new locally transmitted cases of COVID-19 for the first time since July.

The latest outbreak was driven mainly by infections first detected on July 20 among a few airport workers in the eastern city of Nanjing who had been contracted to the highly transmissible Delta variant, first identified in India, Reuters reported.

Since then, more than 1,200 people in China have been confirmed to be infected, though not all of them were cases of the Delta variant.

The outbreak has spurred local authorities across the country to impose tough counter-epidemic measures including mass testing for millions of people to identify and isolate carriers, as well as treat the infected.

No one has died in the current outbreak, which has largely focused on the cities of Nanjing and Yangzhou in the province of Jiangsu, near the financial hub of Shanghai.

China has taken a zero-tolerance approach towards containing new infections, wary of the social and economic upheavals caused by the initial outbreak of COVID-19 early last year in the world’s most populous nation.

Mainland China as of Aug. 22 has recorded 94,652 confirmed cases, with a death toll of 4,636, unchanged since late January.