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Coronavirus pandemic

Government taking all necessary measures to prevent coronavirus in Russia — official

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said that the Russian authorities are "closely monitoring the situation" with the outbreak of the new coronavirus in China

© Mikhail Solunin/TASS

MOSCOW, January 28. /TASS/. The government is taking all necessary measures to prevent the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV from spreading to Russia, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova told Channel One on Tuesday.

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"We are closely monitoring the situation. I want to calm people down. We have enough emergency and planned measures which may be taken to prevent this situation from developing in Russia," Golikova said.

She also advised to pay attention only to updates on the new coronavirus from official sources. "A lot of false information has emerged on social networks — information that is not true and that does not reflect what is really happenning in China. I ask you to pay attention to the information from the Russian authorities, in particular from [Russian consumer rights watchdog] Rospotrebnadzor as they closely cooperate with China," the deputy prime minister stressed. She noted that no cases of the new coronavirus have been confirmed in Russia so far.

On December 31, 2019, Chinese authorities informed the World Health Organization (WHO) about an outbreak of an unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, a large trade and industrial center in central China populated by 11 million people. On January 7, 2020, Chinese experts identified the infecting agent as coronavirus 2019-nCoV. As of Tuesday, January 28, over 100 people have died from the new coronavirus, and the number of people infected with 2019-nCoV surpassed 4,600.

The new strain of coronavirus has already been identified in almost all Chinese provinces including Beijing and Shanghai as well as in other countries such as Australia, Malaysia, Nepal, France, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, the United States and Japan. The World Health Organization recognized the pneumonia outbreak in China as a national emergency but stopped short of declaring it an international one.

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