Medical personnel collect throat swabs from local residents in Tianjin Binhai New Area. Photo: AFP

North China's Tianjin Municipality confirmed on Thursday a coronavirus variant, first found in the UK, in an imported case who was diagnosed as asymptomatic on January 8, according to local CDC. 

Tianjin is the fifth Chinese city to report the virus variant initially detected in the UK. The other Chinese cities are Shanghai, Guangzhou of South China's Guangdong Province, Qingdao in East China's Shandong Province, and Beijing.

The case was an arrival who flew from Paris to Tianjin on January 7. The patient entered a collective quarantine point and diagnosed a silent virus carrier the next day. The local CDC's genetic sequencing of the nucleic acid test detected the virus variant that was first found in the UK. 

China reported the first case of the kind in Shanghai, a 23-year-old female student who returned to Shanghai from the UK and tested positive for the virus on December 14. Besides Tianjin and Shanghai, Beijing also found on Wednesday that the coronavirus strain in two confirmed cases reported on Sunday were the same as the variant first reported by the UK. 

Experts have called for stronger prevention and control measures to curb the spread of the more transmissible variant in the country.

Feng Zijian, a deputy director of the CDC, said at a press conference on Wednesday that the anti-epidemic work has become more difficult as the mutated form of the virus spreads more easily.