The COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, part of the global COVID-19 pandemic, was the first identified outbreak of the pandemic, appearing as a cluster of mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei, China. A Wuhan hospital notified the local Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and health commissions on December 27, 2019. On December 31, Wuhan CDC admitted that there was a cluster of unknown pneumonia cases related to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market after the unverified documents appeared on the Internet. The outbreak soon drew nationwide attention, with the National Health Commission (NHC) in Beijing sending medical experts to Wuhan the next day. On January 8, a new coronavirus was identified as the cause of the pneumonia. The sequence of the virus was soon published on an open-access database. Measures taken by China have been controversial. They were praised by the World Health Organization (WHO) for improvements over SARS-CoV-2 responses, but maligned by many in the international community for being slow to publicly disclose key facts or deceptive about the outbreak and for aggressively censoring information related to the outbreak and public discontent from citizens online.

On 23 January 2020, the central government of China imposed a lockdown in Wuhan and other cities in Hubei in an effort to quarantine the center of an outbreak of COVID-19; this action was commonly referred to as the Wuhan lockdown. The World Health Organization (WHO), although stating that it was beyond its own guidelines, commended the move, calling it "unprecedented in public health history".