A volunteer operates a remote controlled disinfection robot to disinfect a residental area amid the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on March 16. Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

Wuhan, the Chinese city at ground zero of the coronavirus pandemic, will need to see 14 consecutive days of no new cases before travel restrictions can be lifted, a top Chinese health expert told state media on Tuesday.

Speaking to the state-run China Daily newspaper, Li Lanjuan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and senior adviser to the country’s top health authority said:

“If no new case of the coronavirus has been reported for 14 consecutive days in Wuhan following the last reported cases, we believe it will be a time when the lockdown can gradually be lifted.”

Mainland China has seen a steady decline in locally transmitted cases for weeks, even as numbers skyrocketed across the rest of the world. Today, China reported its first day of no new domestic cases since the outbreak started -- all new cases were imported from abroad.

Wuhan had been reporting cases in the single digits leading up to today's announcement.

The rest of the country has been slowly relaxing restrictions on people's movements in the past week, with highways reopening and quarantine stations closing.

Inter-provincial travel, which had previously been shut down entirely, is gradually resuming. People from other provinces are now allowed into Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, if they pass temperature checks and have the appropriate "health codes" -- color-coded passes that indicate permission to travel.