China could easily enter a technical recession as the country's coronavirus outbreak weighs on growth, an economist told CNBC Tuesday.

Speaking to CNBC's "Street Signs," Diana Choyleva, chief economist at Enodo Economics, said the virus had come at "a very bad time for China."

"Not only has growth slowed down significantly in the second half of last year, but this year was going to be the crunch time for trying to sort out China's very large bad debt problem," she explained.

Choyleva said that based on Enodo's estimates, credit losses arising from the Chinese coronavirus were likely to amount to 20% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). She also noted that the shutdown of the Hubei province — where the virus was first reported — was "unprecedented" and "severe."

"The impact on the economy's going to be much bigger than SARS," she told CNBC. She added that her company had been calculating China's growth numbers since 2005, and the second half of 2019 had seen an annualized rate of just over 3%.

"So when we then estimate what the impact's going to be like, even on the assumption that it will be a repeat of SARS — I think it will be worse — we could easily get into a technical recession in China in the first half of this year," Choyleva added.