MOSCOW, February 25. /TASS/. The first coronavirus case has been confirmed on Tuesday in the south of Switzerland, the Blick media portal reported referring to the Federal Office of Public Health.

It said the coronavirus case was reported in the canton of Ticino bordering on northern Italy. A lab in Geneva checked the test results.

A local outbreak of the novel coronavirus was reported in northern Italy, where more than 230 people were infected as of February 24. Most of the infected people live in the northern region of Lombardy. Seven people have died. The local authorities are taking strict quarantine measures; the neighboring EU states consider imposing border epidemiology controls.

On December 31, 2019, Chinese health officials reported a cluster of cases of acute respiratory illness to the World Health Organization in Wuhan, an economic and industrial metropolis with a population of 11 million. The virus - now named COVID-19 (2019-nCoV), otherwise known as the novel coronavirus - was identified on January 7, 2020.

Apart from China, 33 countries, including Russia, have reported confirmed coronavirus cases. According to the latest data, the overall number of people who contracted the novel coronavirus in China is about 77,600, as many as 2,663 people have died and over 27,200 have recovered.

The outbreak of novel coronavirus infection has the potential for becoming a pandemic, World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a briefing in Geneva on Monday.

"Does this virus have pandemic potential? Absolutely, it has. Are we there yet? From our assessment, not yet," Ghebreyesus added.