China's health authority has reported that there are no new locally transmitted cases of Covid-19 for the first time since July, offering more signs that the current outbreak which began late last month may be tapering off soon, Reuters reports.

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 contracted the highly transmissible Delta variant, first identified in India.

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.

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.