However, a total of 34 new COVID-19 cases were reported on the Chinese mainland.

The overall confirmed cases on the mainland have reached 80,881 by the end of Monday.

11 new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus infection and 13 deaths were reported on the Chinese mainland on Friday, NHC said, adding all of the deaths were in the Hubei Province, the epicentre of the disease.

A 55-year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to have contracted the viral infection on November 17 last year and cases rapidly began piling up since then, it said, without revealing the gender of the individual.

The cases of infection have been rising rapidly in Europe and other parts of the world, with Italy being the hardest-hit country.

Xi, also the general secretary of the ruling Communist Party of China, arrived in Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus outbreak, on Tuesday for an inspection of the epidemic prevention and control work in Hubei province and its capital city Wuhan, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The overall confirmed cases on the mainland reached 80,735 by the end of Sunday which included 3,119 people who have died so far.

Around 71 people were trapped in the hotel that collapsed on Saturday in Quanzhou city of the province. The hotel was used to quarantine and observe people who had come to the province during the novel coronavirus prevention and control and had come in contact with the virus patients.

All the 27 deaths occurred in the virus-hit central Hubei province, China's National Health Commission (NHC) said. The confirmed cases for the first time fell below 50 since COVID-19 surfaced in Hubei province in January.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for undiminished vigilance on the prevention and control work of the COVID-19 as the situation in the Wuhan City and Hubei Province remains severe

The deadly coronavirus is wreaking havoc globally, killing over 50 people in Iran, 34 in Italy and 22 in South Korea.

The country's National Health Commission in its daily update said it received reports of 52 deaths, all from Hubei, and 406 new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus infection from all over the country.

The Wuhan local administration earlier announced that people who are not quarantined and seeking special treatment or stranded in the city can leave in batches.

The death toll climbed to 2,592 with 150 new fatalities while the total number of confirmed cases increased to over 77,000, health officials said on Monday.

President Xi, who attended a meeting in Beijing to double efforts in coordinating the prevention and control of the COVID-19 outbreak, said the epidemic 'has the fastest transmission, widest range of infection and has been the most difficult to prevent and control'.

Besides controlling the spread of the virus, a major task of the WHO team along with their Chinese counterparts was to come up with a standard medicine to cure the disease.

The overall confirmed infection cases have climbed to 75,465, Chinese health officials said on Friday.

Shah is in Arunachal Pradesh to attend the 34th Statehood Day function and launch a number of projects related to industry and roads, officials said.

China on Wednesday expelled three Wall Street Journal correspondents, the largest expulsion of overseas media personnel from the country in more than three decades, after the newspaper declined to apologise for a column which Beijing criticised as "racist" and tarnishing its efforts to combat the deadly coronavirus epidemic. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said China made repeated representations to the US newspaper over the opinion piece which had the headline: 'China is the real sick man of Asia', but regretted that it had not offered a public apology.

The commission added that 11,977 patients remained in severe condition, and 5,248 people were suspected of being infected with the virus, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.