COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei: Municipal health officials in Wuhan announce the first recorded death from COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei was the first identified outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. It emerged as a cluster of mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei, China. A Wuhan hospital initially notified the local Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) on December 27, 2019. By December 31, Wuhan CCDC confirmed a cluster of unknown pneumonia cases linked to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market after unverified documents appeared on the Internet. The outbreak got nationwide attention, with the National Health Commission (NHC) in Beijing sending medical experts to Wuhan the next day. On January 8, 2020, a new coronavirus was identified as the cause of the pneumonia. The sequence of the virus was published on an open-access database. The measures taken by the Chinese government have been controversial. They were praised by the World Health Organization (WHO) for improvements over their response to SARS-CoV-2. However, many in the international community criticized them for being deceptive, slow to publicly disclose key facts about the outbreak, and for aggressively censoring information related to the outbreak and public discontent from citizens online.