Nayrouz News Agency : China's mainland recorded 63 new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus on Thursday, up from 62 a day earlier, the country's National Health Commission (NHC) reported.

Of those new cases, 61 were travelers arriving from abroad, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in 31 provincial-level regions on the Chinese mainland to 81,865, the Commission said in a statement.

Chinese authorities do not count asymptomatic cases as part of its tally of confirmed coronavirus infections until patients show symptoms such as a fever or a cough.

The main concern of China in recent weeks is the imported cases coming from abroad, as well as coronavirus spread by infected people who have no symptoms 'silent carriers', according to local media.

China on Wednesday ended its two-month lockdown of Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus first emerged, but a town in the north started applying restrictions on peoples' movement amid fears of a fresh wave of infections.

Chinese authorities had sealed off the city of 11 million people to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus to other parts of the country. Over 50,000 people in Wuhan caught the virus and more than 2,500 of them died, according to official figures.