OBJECTIVE To reveal more data on the epidemiologic and clinical characteristics of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients outside of Wuhan, from five hospitals in east of Zhejiang province, China. DESIGN Retrospective case series. SETTING Five hospitals in east of Zhejiang province, China. PARTICIPANTS 88 cases of laboratory-confirmed and 3 cases of clinical-confirmed COVID-19 were admitted to hospital. Data were collected from 20 January 2020 to 11 February 2020. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES A team of physicians who had been treating these patients extracted and recorded the exposure history, clinical symptoms, chest computed tomography and laboratory findings from medical records and sent the data to the working group in Ningbo to review and calculate. RESULTS Of all 91 patients, 88 (96.70%) were laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 pneumonia with throat swab samples that tested positive for SARS-Cov-2 while 3 (3.30%) were clinical-diagnosed COVID-19 pneumonia cases. The median age of the patients was 50 (36.5-57) years, and female accounted for 59.34%. In this sample 40 (43.96%) patients had contracted the diseases from local cases, 31 (34.07%) patients had been to Wuhan/Hubei, 8 (8.79%) cases had contacted with people from Wuhan, 11 (12.09%) cases were confirmed aircraft transmission. In particular within the city of Ningbo, 60.52% cases can be traced back to an event held in a temple. The most common symptoms were fever (71.43%), cough (60.44%) and fatigue (43.96%). The median of incubation period was 6 (IQR, 3-8) days and the median time from first visit to a doctor to confirmed diagnosis was 1 (1-2) days. According to the Chest computed tomography scans, 67.03% cases had bilateral pneumonia, and 27.47% cases showed unilateral pneumonia. CONCLUSION Social activity cluster, family cluster and travel by airplane were how COVID-19 patients get transmitted and could be rapidly diagnosed COVID-19 in Zhejiang.