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China’s top official arrives in Wuhan amid pneumonia outbreak - portal

Li Keqiang will visit hospitals where the infected are taken to

BEIJING, January 27. /TASS/. China’s State Council Premier Li Keqiang has arrived on Monday to Wuhan where a new pneumonia-like virus epidemic broke out, The Paper news portal reports.

According to the portal, the head of the Chinese government will visit hospitals where the infected are taken to. Moreover, he intends to directly study the situation on the ground and talk to doctors overseeing treatment of the people who contracted the pneumonia.

According to the official data, the number of coronavirus cases exceeded 2,700 while 80 people died from it. Most cases (1423 infected and 76 deaths) are concentrated in the central Hubei Province with its administrative center of Wuhan. It is followed by the Guangdong Province (south) and Zhejiang Province (east). Sixty-eight patients were identified in Beijing, while the Heilongjiang Province neighboring Russia has 21 detected cases with one person dead from the disease.

On December 31, Chinese authorities informed the World Health Organization (WHO) about an outbreak of an unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhah - a large trade and industrial center in central China populated by 11 million people. On January 7, Chinese experts identified the infecting agent - coronavirus 2019-nCoV. The new type of coronavirus has already been identified in other countries - Australia, Malaysia, Nepal, France, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, the United States and Japan. The WHO recognized the pneumonia outbreak in China as a national emergency but stopped short of declaring an international one.

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