A student was shot and killed Wednesday at a high school in North Carolina, authorities in the southern US state said.

Police dispatched to Mount Tabor High School in Winston-Salem found one student who had been shot. 

The student was transported to a local hospital, where he "succumbed to his injuries," police department chief Catrina Thompson said during a press conference.

The shooting suspect, believed to be another student at the school, fled the scene. He was later apprehended "without incident," Winston-Salem police said on Twitter.

After a year of largely remote learning due to the pandemic, US students returning to in-person school this month face a renewed risk of mass shootings, which have plagued the American education system for years. 

Wednesday's shooting was already the second at a North Carolina high school just this week.

"For the second time this week, we have seen a shooting in a North Carolina school," state governor Roy Cooper said in a statement posted to Twitter.

"We must work to ensure the safety of students and educators, quickly apprehend the shooter and keep guns off school grounds."

Such incidents are reported by local media but often fail to garner national headlines when relatively few students are involved -- it can seem that only a massacre, such as the 2018 shooting that saw 17 students killed in Parkland, Florida, is remarkable enough to amass wider attention.