According to TASS, the head of the Hubei Provincial Health Committee Yang Yunyan said this at a press conference.

“According to the data at 20:00 local time (15:00 Moscow time), the number of people infected in Hubei was 444, 17 people died,” he said.

Earlier it was reported that in the Chinese city of Wuhan, dozens of people fell ill with an unknown form of pneumonia. Later it became known that the cause of the outbreak of viral pneumonia of unknown origin was a new type of coronavirus.

Various states of the world have already taken measures in connection with the appearance of this virus. For example, airports in the United States and Great Britain began to check people arriving from Wuhan for a new type of coronavirus, and the Russian authorities tightened sanitary-quarantine controls at the Russian-Chinese border. Also, the Russian Ministry of Health has begun to create a vaccine against coronavirus.

Along with this, information appeared that the number of victims of this virus continues to grow, as well as the number of infected. The geography of distribution is increasing, in particular, in the United States recorded the first case of infection with it. At the same time, cases of infection of physicians with a new type of coronavirus have been confirmed in China.

Against all this data, Li Bin, deputy head of the PRC State Committee for Hygiene and Health, announced possible mutations of a new type of coronavirus.