The total number killed by the Wuhan coronavirus 2019-nCoV has reached 56, Chinese officials said on Sunday.
China's central Hubei province that's at the centre of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak revealed 13 new deaths caused by the illness.
State media CCTV reported the new deaths on Sunday while Shanghai also reported its first death from the virus.
The official number of people infected with the virus is now 1,975 after Hubei confimed 323 new confirmed cases of infections.
Separately, the province of Henan reported one death from coronavirus infection.
Canada has also diagnosed its first case.
Toronto Public Health received notification of the first presumptive confirmed case of coronavirus in a resident who recently returned from Wuhan, a city in the Hubei province in central China, the government said in a statement.
"The individual is stable and is hospitalised," the statement added.
The individual arrived in Toronto on January 22 and was hospitalised the next day after developing symptoms of respiratory illness.
The victim is a man in his 50s and Ontario health officials said he took private transportation home after getting down at Toronto airport.
Ontario health officials said his family members have been put into self isolation, though the government declined to give the number of people in the family.
Australia confirmed its first four cases of the new coronavirus in two different cities on Saturday.
Malaysia confirmed four and France reported Europe’s first cases on Friday, as health authorities around the world scrambled to prevent a pandemic.
Each person infected with coronavirus is passing the disease on to between two and three other people on average at current transmission rates, according to two separate scientific analyses of the epidemic.
One expert called those results "thermonuclear pandemic level bad", noting it was more contagious than the Spanish Flu which killed tens of millions a century ago.
Scientists also said it's likely only a fraction of the infections have been detected, and it may be spreading person-to-person before symptoms are apparent.
Reuters / Newshub.
