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And before we leave that Australian press conference, one final word from the chief medical officer, professor Brendan Murphy, on the policy of not-testing for coronavirus people who are a) not symptomatic and b) haven’t recently returned from overseas or been in contact with a confirmed or suspected case.

Murphy said:

We’re not testing people without symptoms at the moment. There is no value in testing people without symptoms. Currently, our approach is testing — and that’s the international approach — is testing people who have respiratory symptoms and who have been a returned traveller or who are a contact.

Murphy said the focus in Australia was building testing capacity so there can be a same-day turnaround on testing results.

He said the reason there is “no value” in testing people who are asymptomatic is that a negative test result does not mean that a person is not incubating the virus. So before a person is symptomatic the test can return, essentially, a false negative.

The Australian government is expected to announce a stimulus package on Thursday to bolster an economy that has taken a battering over the coronavirus. It’s expected to include details of financial support for casual and low-paid workers who may not have good sick leave provisions, to support people who are asked to go into self isolation.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, was asked about comments from the NSW business council suggesting employers should not pay sick leave unless their employees are actually sick — so not if they are asked to go into precautionary isolation.

Morrison said he would encourage workers to be “flexible”.

Where people are in a position where they have to isolate, either have an obligation to or otherwise, I’d be encouraging employees to take a flexibility and forward-leaning approach in supporting their employees during this process....

Businesses, particularly large businesses, you know, they will be watched closely, I think, through the months ahead. You know, businesses spend a lot of time talking about the value and integrity of their brands. Well, their brands will be defined in these months ahead.

He said the stimulus package to be announced tomorrow would be “well-balanced,” and that the crisis would have “a finite impact on the economy.” So there is a need for the response to be “proportionate”. Interpret that as you will.

The Australian health minister, Greg Hunt, acknowledged that some comments he made on Sunday — reported without context — sparked confusion about the need for everyone in Australia with cold and/or flu like symptoms to get tested for coronavirus.

Hunt:

So it’s a message to all of us to make sure that we’re reporting carefully and fully, but equally for us, we’ve already begun our communications in terms of what we’re providing online and the advice.

Hunt said more than 20,000 people have been tested in Australia so far.

So to recap on the substance of that funding announcement in Australia this morning:

• $615m for primary care health networks, to cover costs of treatment, diagnosis and testing
• A new Medicare telehealth item, so people in home isolation can be treated via telehealth. Health minister Greg Hunt said that will also mean that particularly vulnerable groups, like people with compromised immunity, do not have to come into hospital or a GP.
• $200m to establish 100 respiratory clinics across the country.
• $100m for workforce support for aged care.
• $30m for research into vaccines, anti-virals, immunotherapy, or respiratory treatments
• $1m in funding for the national medical stockpiling and national coordination.

More details on that package from Guardian Australia’s chief political correspondent Sarah Martin, here:

Australia’s chief medical officer, professor Brendan Murphy, is urging people who have not recently been overseas not to seek testing for coronavirus, saying they are putting “a burden on the system.”

Murphy says:

We have seen over recent days a number of people seeking testing who don’t need it. It’s clear that there is some anxiety in the community with over 100 cases, but I say — as I have said on many occasions — a couple of things: Most of these cases are related to imports from overseas. There is only one element of significant community transmission and that’s small and controlled in Sydney.

There is no point being tested at the moment if you have not travelled or if you’ve not been in contact - even if you have flu-like illnesses. We are not saying to people who get acute respiratory symptoms, a cold or a flu, to go and get tested for COVID-19. We are saying that if you’ve come back from overseas, if you’re a returned traveller or you’ve been in contact with someone who has been a confirmed case, then you should be tested.

But other Australians do not need testing and all they’re doing is putting an unnecessary burden on the testing.

Australian market slumps

Australia’s market has fallen on open, defying the lead set by a rally on US markets inspired by president Donald Trump’s promise of significant economic stimulus to combat the coronavirus crisis.

The benchmark ASX200 index fell 0.59% shortly after trade opened on Wednesday morning.

Overnight, Australian time, US markets were up around 5% but the London exchange’s FTSE index recorded a small fall of 0.1%.

Australians are now waiting for details of a local stimulus package, which prime minister Scott Morrison is expected to reveal on Thursday.

Earlier on Wednesday morning, Australia’s biggest bank, the Commonwealth Bank, announced it would be cutting small business loan rates by 0.25 percentage points, matching rivals Westpac and NAB.

The cut is part of a series of measures designed to help customers hit by the outbreak that also including waiving fees for small businesses and allowing them to put off loan repayments for three months.

It said it would also try to pay more of its small and medium-sized suppliers immediately. The bank says currently two-thirds of suppliers get paid straight away and it wants to move the rest to immediate payment terms when practical.

In Australia, Victoria stands up disaster response centre

In Australia, Victoria has stood up the state control centre — most recently used during the devastating bushfires — to manage its coronavirus response.

The number of people who have tested positive to the virus in Victoria has risen to 21 and in New South Wales it has risen by six to 61. The number of cases in Australia topped 100 yesterday.

In a statement, the premier Daniel Andrews said: “The likely COVID-19 pandemic will have significant impacts across our economy and across our state, including schools, businesses, and places of mass gatherings, such as sporting and cultural events.”

The state control centre will be used to coordinate the response between state and federal health authorities, and manage the output of public information.

Victoria has also set up seven screening clinics for people who believe they may have coronavirus: Royal Melbourne Hospital, Alfred Hospital, Austin Hospital, Box Hill Hospital, Monash Clayton, Northern Hospital and Sunshine Hospital.

Those clinics screened 1,039 people on Tuesday and the state coronavirus hotline fielded 14,500 calls. The number of confirmed cases in Victoria jumped by three overnight to 21. Two schools — Carey Baptist Grammar School and Yeshivah-Beth Rivkah College, both in Melbourne — have been closed after teachers tested positive.

Authorities are trying to trace 45 people who came into contact with a teacher at Yeshivah-Beth Rivkah College, anyone who may have been on a flight from San Francisco to Melbourne on which another woman later tested positive to Covid-19.

They are also trying to trace people who may have come into contact with the third person to test positive overnight. That man went to a jazz festival in the South Melbourne markets on 7 March and a rugby union on the same day.

Here’s a little more reaction from Nadine Dorries to the news of her diagnosis:

In the USA, recommendations aimed at stopping the virus’s spread are due to be unveiled in the four hardest-hit states soon, the vice president Mike Pence has promised. He’s told reporters:

In the next 24 hours, we will be working with not only Washington state, but California, with New York and Florida and unveiling our recommendations.

Here’s some more detail on the Dorries news from one of the journalists who broke the story:

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, has tweeted this response to the news:

And here, via the Daily Mirror, is a statement from Dorries:

In the UK, a health minister is reportedly in isolation after testing positive for coronavirus.

According to the Times, Nadine Dorries, a parliamentary under secretary of state at the Department of Health and Social Care, fell ill last Friday and her diagnosis was confirmed on Tuesday.

The paper’s reporting that Dorries has “met hundreds of people in parliament in the past week and attended a reception at No 10 with Boris Johnson”. She is said to be recovering. This is the first case of an MP testing positive and the news comes amid discussions over whether parliament should be temporarily shut down.

Turkey has confirmed its first case, its health minister Fahrettin Koca has said. According to Reuters, he said the patient has been isolated and their relatives are under observation.

Google is recommending that all of its North American staff work from home, according to Business Insider, which reports:

On Tuesday, the Silicon Valley-based search giant sent out a memo to its workforce informing that it was now changing its policies to recommend all workers who are able to work remotely do so until at least 10 April, sources familiar with the matter said. A Google spokesperson confirmed the order via email.

Both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have cancelled Tuesday campaign events in Ohio amid coronavirus concerns, the Associated Press (AP) is reporting.

Sanders had been planning to speak at a convention centre in Cleveland as results from six states voting in the Democratic presidential contests began rolling in. But he pulled the plug only about three hours before it was scheduled to start and his campaign announced that decisions on future events would be made on a case-by-case basis, according to AP. It quoted his campaign spokesman, Mike Casca, as saying:

Out of concern for public health and safety, we are canceling tonights rally in Cleveland. We are heeding the public warnings from Ohio state officials, who have communicated concern about holding large, indoor events during the coronavirus outbreak. All future Bernie 2020 events will be evaluated on a case by case basis.

A Biden spokesman initially suggested the former vice president’s own event in Cleveland would go on as scheduled, but his campaign subsequently released a statement saying it was off, AP says.

More on Hatch End High School in Harrow, which has remained open despite confirmation that a “person at the school”, who was onsite as recently as last Friday, is being treated for Covid-19.

A source at the school, speaking on condition of anonymity, said news of the diagnosis was communicated to teachers in the morning – but parents were not informed until the end of the school day. They claimed staff were told they could catch the virus, but symptoms were likely to be mild.

Some teachers and parents were reportedly concerned about the decision not to close the school, which was taken after advice from Public Health England – and there was speculation some families could opt to keep their children at home on Wednesday.

Dr Atherton has said:

I can confirm that nine additional individuals in Wales have tested positive for coronavirus (Covid-19), bringing the total number of positive cases in Wales to 15.

All of the individuals are being managed in clinically appropriate settings. All appropriate measures to provide care for the individuals and to reduce the risk of transmission to others are being taken.

We have always been clear that we expected the number of positive cases to increase, which is in line with what has happened in other parts of the world.

The identification of the seven individuals linked to the Neath Port Talbot resident case shows that the contact tracing and community testing being carried out by Public Health Wales is working as it should.

I’d like to take this opportunity to assure the public that Wales and the whole of the UK is prepared for these types of incidents. Working with our partners in Wales and the UK, we have implemented our planned response, with robust infection control measures in place to protect the health of the public.

The small German town of Gross-Gerau has created a drive-through for coronavirus testing, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency reports.

The drive-in facility at the local hospital is designed to minimise medical staff and patients’ exposure. “Extraordinary times call for extraordinary solutions,” Dr Roxana Sauer, a medical director at Gross-Gerau district hospital, told AFP.

Since last week, patients have been able to call ahead and consult a physician by phone, who decides whether they should be tested. The person is then assigned a time slot and asked to park outside a side entrance of the hospital, where they are met by a doctor clad head to toe in protective gear.

After rolling down the car window, the potential patient is swabbed in the mouth or nostril before driving off again. Their sample is sent to a lab, which returns the result within 24 hours and the patient is then notified by phone.

Similar drive-through testing sites have sprung up in other German hospitals in recent days, as well as in South Korea, the United States and Britain. “People love that it can be done so quickly and easily,” said Sauer.None of the 32 tests carried out so far has come back positive but the hospital’s coronavirus hotline has been ringing off the hook.

The New York auto show is set to be postponed until August because of the coronavirus outbreak, automakers and a spokesman for the show have said. The annual event, which draws thousands of reporters and hundreds of thousands of visitors, is now likely to be postponed.

According to Reuters, a spokesman for the show said organisers were “headed in the direction” of moving it to August and a final decision is expected by Wednesday.

In their response to the coronavirus outbreak, public health experts and government officials have repeatedly referenced the importance of “flattening the curve”. But what does this mean, exactly?

In the UK, Transport for London has confirmed one of its head office staff tested positive on Monday.

We are working closely with Public Health England and are following their advice after a member of staff tested positive for Covid-19. The safety of our staff and customers is our top priority, so we are taking all necessary precautions and a deep clean has taken place within the building used by the staff member.

This person is not believed to be additional to the UK government’s latest tally of cases.

Here’s a little more on those comments from Varadkar, who has said health ministers across the European Union will talk to each other every day to help tackle the spread of Covid-19.

To ensure a more coordinated approach at EU level, we agreed that health, and other relevant ministers, talk to each other every day.

We welcome the European Commission’s announcements that would bring forward legislation to protect airline landing spots where flights are stopped from the most affected areas.

As you know, all flights have been suspended between Italy and Ireland. The Covid-19 cabinet committee will meet again on Friday and again on Monday to discuss further actions.

And I want to assure the public that all actions being taken by government have been taken on the advice of the experts, National Public Health Emergency Team ... led by the Chief Medical Officer, and informed by guidance from the World Health Organisation and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

Every action that they’ve recommended has been taken today. And every day we asked the experts: Is there more that we should do? But they remind us of the need to make the right interventions at the right time for the right length of time, because anything else could be counterproductive.

Spain will guarantee the supply of medicines and open credit lines to small businesses as part of a program of measures aimed at alleviating the impact of coronavirus, its prime minister Pedro Sánchez has said.

Speaking after the meeting of EU leaders, he said he had also asked for EU fiscal rules to be relaxed to give the country more economic firepower to confront the virus.

Speaking after the EU’s funding announcement, the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said:

We all agreed that our highest priority as EU leaders must be protecting public health and human life, preventing the spread of the virus and working to mitigate its impact on our people.

We agreed to funding research in Europe that will develop new tests, a treatment and a vaccine as rapidly as possible.

We agreed the need for a coordinated approach to the bureau of medicines, medical devices and protective equipment including establishing an inventory of stock and also production capacity so that our health services are prepared for a number of cases, as they continue to increase, as they inevitably will.

Jersey has confirmed its first case, the local government’s health and community services department has said. They said the person was tested at the end of last week and a positive result was confirmed on Tuesday.

The person is well and has been in self-isolation at home since returning from northern Italy. HCS is in daily telephone contact with the patient and will do further swabs after the patient has cleared symptoms to ensure they have also cleared the virus.

Dr Ivan Muscat, Jersey’s deputy medical officer of health, has said:

Officers from environmental health are in the process of contacting the necessary passengers asking them to self-isolate. It does not affect everybody on the flight. If the team do not contact you then there is no need to worry and you do not need to contact the department or the helpline. We have all the contact details of the people we need to speak to.

We recognise that with the presentation of the first case in Jersey that there may be some concern. However, it is essential that we are open with Islanders about this news, and to ensure that we give the best possible treatment and care to our patient whilst protecting their confidentiality.

Authorities on Guernsey say they too have confirmed one case.

According to HuffPost UK, the first case in Jamaica has been confirmed in a woman who travelled there from the UK:

The Royal College of Psychiatrists has decided not to hold any gatherings of more than 100 people, in an early example of an organisation in the UK instigating “social distancing” measures to combat coronavirus.

The move is intended to protect members, staff and also patients who are being treated for mental ill-health from contracting the virus, the college explained. It comes ahead of Thursday’s meeting of the government’s Cobra committee, which may signal a shift from “contain” to “delay” tactics and trigger a ban on large-scale gatherings.

It means that college events due to feature more than 100 people have been cancelled or postponed, including cancellation of an International Women’s Day event for secondary school pupils on Thursday and the annual conference next week of its faculty of old age psychiatry and trainees. Paul Rees, the college’s chief executive, has said:

It is with deep regret that we have decided to take the unprecedented action and postpone large college events. The safety of our members, staff and patients is of paramount importance and we will do all we can to protect them from the coronavirus.

From next Monday, the 240 staff at its London HQ will also have to work from home two days a week and observe social distance guidelines when they are in the office. They are also being told not to travel for meetings and not to undertake work trips abroad for the next month.

However, the RCPsych’s annual international congress, which is scheduled for the end of June, is still due to go ahead.

Meanwhile, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has become the latest UK medical organisation to postpone its annual conference because its members – doctors who specialise in children’s health – are more likely to be needed in the NHS because of the serious threat posed by the virus. The event was due to take place at the end of April, when hospitals and other services may be even busier than usual, if the outbreak has become an epidemic by then.

Dr Camilla Kingdon, the college’s vice-president for education and training has said:

In light of public health concerns, we have decided to postpone the annual conference. Our first duty is to our patients, and it is likely that all of us will be operating under some additional strain in the coming months as we work together to control the spread of COVID-19. We also have a duty of care to you all, and it doesn’t seem sensible to gather such a big group of us together at this time.

In the United States, senior Republican figures are facing backlash over an apparent effort to label Covid-19 as “Chinese coronavirus” – as China accused some US politicians of “disrespecting science” in order to “stigmatize” the country, Adam Gabbatt in New York reports.

Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, are among those to add a geographical marker to the coronavirus in recent days.

Pompeo called the virus the “Wuhan coronavirus” on Friday, referring to the Chinese city where the outbreak started, and McCarthy used the term “Chinese coronavirus” on Monday, when he tweeted out a link to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency that has led the US effort to fight the virus.

Eight new cases of coronavirus have been reported in Georgia, bringing the total in the country to 23, local media report.

According to a report in the Georgian Journal, 126 people are under quarantine and 46 are currently under surveillance in hospitals.

The increase comes as Georgia repatriated 156 nationals from Italy, Europe’s worst-affected nation, in two planes that touched down in Tbilisi today.

The passengers will undergo thermal screening and be placed into quarantine for 14 days, Agenda.ge reports.

Also today, Salome Zourabichvili, the Georgian president, announced she would be cancelling planned visits to Bulgaria, Ukraine and Belgium.

Back here in the UK, a school in north-west London has had a Covid-19 case confirmed but health officials have said there’s no need for it to close, nor for any staff or pupils to be put into quarantine, Kevin Rawlinson reports.

Hatch End high school has published a letter from its headteacher confirming a person at the school has tested positive, though it did not say whether they are staff or a puil.”

The person was last in school on Friday 6 March. PHE have conducted a risk assessment and advised us that no staff or pupils need to exclude themselves from school.”

A group of pupils and a small number of staff members have been asked to monitor themselves for symptoms, for a period of 14 days (until 20th March). No one in this group has been asked to exclude themselves from school if they are well.”

A note on its website added: “Given the specifics of this case they have determined that a deep clean of the school is not required.”

Ireland has reported 10 new cases of Coronavirus, bringing its total to 34, Rory Carroll reports from Dublin.

The biggest day-on-day rise includes two health workers possibly infected at hospitals, the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (NPHET) said in a statement on Tuesday evening.

Blanket socially restrictive actions around hospitals and nursing homes were not yet necessary, it said. “People are encouraged to follow respiratory etiquette and hand hygiene practices in order to protect vulnerable groups, including older people and patients with underlying conditions. People should not visit if they themselves are unwell.”

There have been 1,784 suspected cases tested in Ireland – a spike of 1,387 tests in one week.

Thousands of passengers aboard a cruise ship struck by the coronavirus waited anxiously Tuesday for their turn to leave the vessel moored in the San Francisco Bay Area, even if it meant being shipped to military bases for weeks of quarantine.

After days of idling off the northern California coast because of evidence that it was the breeding ground for new coronavirus infections, the Grand Princess docked Monday at the port of Oakland with about 3,500 passengers and crew onboard, including 21 who had tested positive for the virus.

About two dozen people who needed acute medical care were taken off the ship first on Monday, although it was not clear how many had tested positive for the virus, said Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the California Office of Emergency Services.

Many of the nearly 240 Canadians onboard left the ship after the critically ill departed and stood outside two tents displaying Canadian flags. Canada and Britain were among the countries sending chartered flights to retrieve their citizens. The ship carried people from 54 countries, and foreigners were to be flown home.

Authorities in Cuba have implemented surveillance measures at all ports and airports to prevent the arrival and spread of coronavirus in the Caribbean country, the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina reports.

Public Health Minister Jose Angel Portal explained that all airports have the lists of passengers, as well as their state of health upon arrival in Cuba, if they come from a country where the disease has been reported, as well as the place where they will stay in Cuba for follow-up.

He assured that the diagnostic kits and the lab capacity are available to determine what kind of respiratory virus is affecting the country, including the COVID-19.

So far just one death from Covid-19 has been reported from anywhere in Latin America, that of a 64-year-old man in Argentina who had recently travelled to Europe.

According to the latest figures collected by Johns Hopkins University, Brazil has the most cases on the continent, with 31, followed by Argentina with 17, Ecuador with 15, Chile with 13, and Peru with 11.

People in Brazil are outraged that far-right president Jair Bolsonaro dismissed the coronavirus today as a “small crisis” and “much more fantasy” than what “the mainstream media propagates” at an investors event in Miami today, Sam Cowie reports.

Despite global economic turmoil, which has rocked Brazil’s currency and stock market, Bolsonaro, who is in the United States on a visit, appears to be echoing the nonchalant response to the crisis of his political idol Donald Trump, with whom he dined at the US president’s Mar-a-Largo Florida resort this weekend.

Brazil, South America’s most populous and wealthy nation has so far held out against the worst of the coronavirus epidemic, with just 25 confirmed cases so far and no deaths, according to the health ministry.

But a Bolsonaro supporters rally, scheduled for this Sunday and criticised by many as anti-democratic for targeting congress and the Supreme Court, institutions that have so far curbed the worst of the former army captain’s authoritarian instincts, could end up being cancelled for fears of the virus spreading further, though some organisers share the president’s skepticism.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has announced the launch of a new government visualisation tool showing the extent of the coronavirus outbreak here in the UK.

At first glace, the tool doesn’t seem terribly granular: the heat map only shows the number of cases by UK country. But if you zoom in it shows the data by local authority area.

(With thanks to the readers who wrote and tweeted to put me right on this.)

Antonia Wilson, on the Guardian travel desk, has been keeping an up to date list of which countries have coronavirus travel restrictions. If you’re planning to travel it would be worth your taking a look.

New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has announced a “containment” plan for New Rochelle, the city at the center of the coronavirus outbreak in the New York metro area, Lauren Aratani reports from New York.

Also on Tuesday, New Jersey announced its first patient death.

New York officials said at a press conference a containment plan will be put in place in a one-mile radius around the synagogue that is believed to be the center of the outbreak in Westchester county.

About 1,000 members of the community were placed under precautionary quarantine due to the spread of Covid-19.

As of Tuesday morning, Westchester county had 108 confirmed cases of coronavirus while New York City had 36, making up the bulk of the 173 cases in New York state.

“New Rochelle is a particular problem,” Cuomo said. “New Rochelle has double the cases of New York City, it’s true, it’s a phenomenon.”

Authorities in Berlin have announced the closure of all theatres, concert halls and its three opera houses to dampen the spread of coronavirus, until at least the end of the Easter holidays on April 19, Kate Connolly reports.

Berlin has also become the 7th of Germany’s 16 states to ban gatherings of 1000 people or more. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor has said authorities should be strict about implementing the bans, insisting at a meeting of her CDU parliamentary group this afternoon that all non essential events should be cancelled with immediate effect.

She said the fact that Bundesliga matches were going ahead empty stadiums “is not the worst that can happen to this country.”

Separately, the head of Poland’s army, Jaroslaw Mika, has tested positive for coronavirus following a visit to German troops, according to the Polish defence ministry. He and his aides are all in quarantine.

Meanwhile leading German economists say that Europe’s largest economy is heading for a recession. “Unfortunately we’re expecting Germany to go into recession in the first half of the year,” the head of the Kiel Institute for World Economy, (IfW), Gabriel Felbermayr.

Other leading economists have voiced the same concerns.

The 27 EU leaders are currently taking part in a teleconference summit on the coronavirus outbreak.

A press conference is due to take place at its conclusion, however it is not yet clear what time that will be. Watch this space.

Here’s some more analysis of those coronavirus infection figures released earlier by the Department of Health and Social Care, from my colleague Matthew Weaver, showing that it is now present in all but two of London’s 32 boroughs.

There are now 91 confirmed cases in the capital spread over every borough with the exception of Bexley and Newham.

The latest council breakdown, which is based on Monday’s figures, shows confirmed cases in six boroughs for the first time. They are: Barking and Dagenham, Croydon, Greenwich, Haringey, Islington, Richmond upon Thames.

Eleven inmates have died in Italy after a series of prison riots erupted over new restrictions imposed by the government to contain the outbreak of coronavirus, Lorenzo Tondo, a Guardian correspondent in Italy, reports.

Tensions have sparked on Sunday when detainees were informed that the new emergency decree banned visits from relatives to reduce infections.

Eight of the deaths stemmed from rioting at Modena’s prison, where all but one victim is thought to have died of overdoses after inmates raided the jail’s pharmacy.

The other person is thought to have died of smoke inhalation after matrasses were set alight during the protests.

Prisoners in Pavia on Monday took two prison officers hostages for hours as other jail riots were also sparked in Salerno, Naples, Alessandria, Vercelli, Bari, Palermo, Foggia and Frosinone.

Inmates fear also of being infected with coronavirus, said Italy’s prison service unions.

In Foggia, several inmates have managed to get out after tearing up a gate at the block house. Police are still trying to track down 23 inmates who escaped during unrest at the complex, as 11 other fugitives were tracked down overnight.

Order was restored at many of the prisons on Tuesday, although riots and protests continued at several others. In Palermo, 400 inmates are said to have taken control of part of the complex.

Angry British tourists have accused British Airways of leaving them “stranded” in Italy after it suspended flights to and from the country because of Coronavirus with Ryanair due to follow suit on Saturday, Lisa O’Carroll reports.

One called the abrupt decision to axe all 60 BA routes as “disgraceful leaving tourists and business travellers scrambling for alternative flights and road transport after Italy imposed a nationwide lockdown to stem the spread of the virus.

Another said “Ryanair has gone up in my estimation” after the airline said it would continue with flights up to and including Friday and may also put on more flights to repatriate the marooned.

A UK passenger told reporters she felt “dumped” by the airline, while another said they had now ordered a taxi to Austria tomorrow morning to escape but were now worried they might get stopped on the border without health certificates, something Slovenia is already demanding.

Media in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have reported the first case of coronavirus in the vast central African state, Jason Burke, the Guardian’s Africa correspondent, reports.

A foreigner who flew into the capital, Kinshasa, from Belgium tested positive on arrival and has since been isolated. Officials say measures are being taken to identify and test anyone who had been in contact with the traveller, with potential quarantine if necessary. The male traveller had not shown any symptoms on leaving Europe, it was reported.

The DRC’s minister of health has asked people to remain calm and follow the recommended measures to ensure good hygiene.

Like several other African nations, the DRC has said it will quarantine any arrivals from China, Iran, Iraq, Germany, France and Italy.

The coronavirus is spreading across the continent, though the vast majority of the near 100 cases detected so far are in Egypt and Algeria. There have been seven cases in South Africa, among a group who travelled to Italy to ski.

Though local conditions vary, experts fear that weak health systems in many African nations will undermine the official response to the disease. Youthful populations may, however, prove more resilient.

The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has reported 31 new confirmed cases of coronavirus in the state, making a total of 173.

Cuomo also announced that he had deployed the national guard to New Rochelle, north of New York City, which has been identified as a coronavirus hot spot, CNBC reports. Schools in the district will be closed from two weeks from Thursday, he said.

North-east Texas has confirmed its first case of coronavirus, the Longview News-Journal reports.

“The patient traveled within the continental United States, has mild illness and has continued self-isolation in their home,” the paper reports.

Cyprus has announced emergency measures to combat the spread of Covid-19, a day after two people on the island were revealed to have contracted coronavirus, Helena Smith, the Guardian’s Athens correspondent, reports.

Following a cabinet meeting, the government announced that schools in Nicosia, the capital, would be temporarily closed and football matches – one of the former British colony’s most popular team sports – held behind closed doors.

Gatherings of more than 75 people will also be prohibited. With church services being included in the ban, president Nicos Anastasiades called the head of the church, Archbishop Chrysostomos, to inform him of the decision – in sharp contrast to Greece, where fierce debate has been ignited by the church’s insistence on holding services, including the sacrament of holy communion despite public health fears.

“All mass events, assemblies, concerts, and parades in public venues are cancelled,” the island’s health minister, Constantinos Ioannou, told reporters.

Speaking after the four-hour cabinet meeting, Ioannou said four of the checkpoint crossings connecting the island’s internationally recognised Greek south with the Turkish-run north will remain closed at least until next week, protests notwithstanding.

The breakaway state announced its first case of Covid-19 earlier on Tuesday, saying a German woman holidaying in the north had tested positive for the virus.

The University of Cyprus said it would also halt classes until 25 March. The government had taken the extraordinary measure of calling for people flying into the island to self–isolate for 14-days – in echoes of a similar move announced by Israel on Monday.

The UK and Greece, originally among those countries listed for the obligatory quarantine period, were eventually removed from the list when it was realised that the measure was likely to have a disastrous effect on the economy.

Kensington and Chelsea in London is the UK local authority with the biggest daily increase in coronavirus infections, according to data just released by the Department of Health and Social Care.

DHSC just updated its breakdown of cases by local authority, which now shows the number of cases in each area as of 9am this morning. Five new cases were detected in Kensington and Chelsea, one of the UK’s wealthiest areas, bringing the total in the borough to 13.

The area with the most cases overall remains Hertfordshire, with three new cases bringing the total in the county to 16.

Barnet, Southwark and Tower Hamlets in London have also registered three new cases apiece, as has Hampshire on the south coast.

These are the local authorities with the most cases so far:

• Hertfordshire 16
  
• Kensington and Chelsea 13
  
• Devon 13
  
• Hampshire 10
  
• Barnet 8
  
• Southwark 8
  
• Brighton and Hove 8

The NHS’s 111 online website appears not to have been updated to take account of the latest public health information on coronavirus stating that travellers returning to the UK from Italy should self-isolate, even if asymptomatic, my colleague Ben Quinn reports.

In an indication of how public health systems are struggling to keep up with a fast-moving crisis, those who visit the online equivalent of the NHS telephone helpline and indicate that they have returned from Italy end up being advised that they do not need to speak to anybody as they have not been to a place that means they need to need to self-isolate.

The out-of-date guidance is on a “quiz” that members of the public can use and which takes them through questions asking, for example, if they have been to China’s Hubei province in the last 14 days.

It comes after the entire state of Italy was designated on Monday in British governmenthealth guidance as being in “category 1”, along with Iran, Hubei and some parts of South Korea.

Travellers coming from those areas and countries are told they should self-isolate, even if asymptomatic. It advises them to go home to their destination and self isolate.

Parents in and around Madrid were urgently trying to arrange impromptu childcare on Tuesday following the regional government’s decision to close all schools in the area for a fortnight in an effort to arrest the spread of the coronavirus, reports the Guardian’s Madrid correspondent Sam Jones.

Spain has so far confirmed 1,646 cases of the virus – 782 of them in the Madrid region – and 35 deaths. On Monday evening, the regional government said that all nurseries, schools and universities would closed their doors on Wednesday and remain shut until 23 March.

On Tuesday, the central government announced its own countermeasures, banning all public events involving more than 1,000 people in Madrid, two areas of the Basque country, and the neighbouring region of La Rioja. It also announced a ban on all flights from Italian airports.

The announcements came as the far-right Vox party apologised for holding a 9,000-person rally in Madrid on Sunday and confirmed that its general secretary had tested positive for the coronavirus and had gone into voluntary quarantine.

Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor, is giving his regular coronavirus update.

The testing crisis in the United States continues, with the governor of North Carolina warning that his state has only enough supplies left to test 300 more people.

The comments by Roy Cooper came as the US Senate’s top democrat warned that the country was “far behind” in testing people for the new coronavirus and said the Trump administration should make ramping up that capability its highest priority in fighting the outbreak.

“This is a healthcare crisis, it demands a healthcare solution,” Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said on the floor of the Senate as lawmakers considered measures to protect the economy from a sharp contraction due to the outbrea, according to Reuters.

A total of 761 confirmed cases of the coronavirus were confirmed nationwide as of late Tuesday morning, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. There have been 27 U.S. coronavirus-related deaths, most of them in Washington state.

Transport for London, which controls much of the public transport in the UK capital, has announced an enhanced cleaning regime across the bus and tube networks.

Cleaning across both networks will now use “additional substances that kill viruses and bacteria on contact”. According to the announcement:

TfL began rolling out enhanced anti-viral fluid, which is used in hospitals, at tube trains and stations on Friday last week to provide added protection. Key interchanges will be cleaned more regularly than usual, including during the day.

The transport union the TSSA welcomed the move, which comes as its general secretary, Manuel Cortes, wrote to Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, calling on him to implement similar measures to those being employed by TfL. Cortes said:

We welcome this move from Transport for London and applaud them for taking practical steps to help keep transport workers and the travelling public safe. Such action is in stark contrast to the silence from the transport secretary.

Despite repeated calls for leadership from the Department for Transport on how the industry should best combat coronavirus, we are yet to hear back from Grant Shapps on this matter of huge public safety and our call for a public transport summit.

Public transport plays a crucial role in the economy and in people’s lives. Keeping transport workers and passengers safe should be a key priority and we urge other companies to take similar action to TfL until we get guidance from government.”

Despite warnings over mass gatherings and the spread of the coronavirus, the mayor of a small town in France has defended a record-breaking rally of people dressed as Smurfs that went ahead in France over the weekend.

Just a day before French authorities banned all gatherings of more than 1,000 people, in a bid to contain the virus, more than 3,500 painted their faces blue and donned the cartoon characters’ liberty cap-style headgear for the gathering in Landerneau, western France.

The Smurf rally drew criticism particularly from the media in Italy, which is battling Europe’s most intense outbreak. But Patrick Leclerc, the mayor of Landerneau, said:

We must not stop living … it was the chance to say that we are alive.

In Greece, the government has just announced that all schools and universities in the whole country will shut down for the next 14 days.

All schools, universities, daycare centres and other educational establishments will close from tomorrow. Greece has so far reported 89 confirmed cases of coronavirus but no deaths.

Announcing the move, Vassilis Kikilias, the health minister, was quoted by Reuters as saying:

Now is the time for all Greeks to show personal responsibility. All schools will be closed for 14 days to help reduce the spread of coronavirus in the community.

With its limited social safety net, the US seems to outside observers to be particularly vulnerable to an outbreak of coronavirus. Sam Levin, one of the Guardian’s US correspondents, has spoken to California’s homeless organisations, which say they lack the resources and government support to stop the spread of infections.

The lack of a coordinated coronavirus strategy for homeless communities could be catastrophic for sick and older people already struggling to survive in tents and overcrowded shelters in California, advocates warned.

Homeless organizations in California, which now has the highest numbers of reported Covid-19 infections along with New York and Washington state, say they lack the resources and government support to effectively stop the virus’ spread in encampments and shelters, and that the shortage of tests and beds could have devastating consequences. California is home to the largest homeless population in the US, with a housing crisis that is already a public health emergency in Los Angeles, the Bay Area and other regions.

“We are not prepared yet for a crisis like this,” said Rev Andy Bales, who runs the Union Rescue Mission (URM) at Skid Row, the epicenter of homelessness in downtown LA. “Individually, we are doing everything we can … but we will be losing precious souls out on the street if we don’t take immediate action.”

Malta has confirmed its fifth case of Covid-19, the Times of Malta reports, after an existing patient’s daughter tested positive for the coronavirus.

The 16-year-old was reported to be in good health. She and her father, 49, had been on a ski trip to Trentino Alto Adige in Italy between 23-27 February, returning via Treviso.

Her mother tested negative for the virus.

This is Damien Gayle taking over the coronavirus live blog now for the next few hours, as Asia goes to sleep, Europe moves into the late afternoon and the Americas wake up.

As usual, I’ll be aggregating the most important news about the developing outbreak from the Guardian’s staff, the news wire agencies, social media and other sources.

Please let me know if you have any news or tips you think I should be including in our coverage, either at damien.gayle@theguardian.com or via my Twitter profile, @damiengayle.

The UN is asking for urgent donations to prepare for the health needs of displaced people affected by the coronavirus outbreak.

UNHCR has said it is looking for an initial $33m “to boost the preparedness, prevention and response activities to address the immediate public health needs of refugees prompted by Covid-19”.

Filippo Grandi, the UN high commissioner for refugees, said:

To date and based on available evidence, there have been no reports of Covid-19 infections among refugees and asylum seekers. However, the virus can affect anyone and it is our collective responsibility to ensure that the global response includes all people

Allowing full access to health services, including for the most marginalised members of the community, is the best way to protect us all. Everyone on this planet – including refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people – should be able to access health facilities and services.

Government figures on the geographical spread of the virus reveal new and increased cases in 24 council areas of England, according to analysis by the Guardian’s data team.

The geographical figures, now released daily with a 24-hour delay to allow for verification, show eight areas where the virus has been detected for the first time.

They are: Dudley, Enfield, North Somerset, Suffolk, Sunderland, Sutton, Waltham Forrest, Wolverhampton and Havering where two new cases were confirmed.

Most of the areas report increases of one case, but in Camden and Oldham new cases doubled from two to four, and in Southwark and Nottinghamshire they increased from three to five.

The other areas reporting increases in cases were: Barnet, Bolton, Brighton, Cornwall, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Surrey, Torbay and Warwickshire.

EU countries are holding a conference call at 4pm today to decide on next steps in relation to coronavirus. They are considering a coordinated response in relation to managing the risk.

Among the subjects that are expected to be discussed are borders, health screening and the international effort to contain the virus. One source said the EU had to take the lead, given the response of Donald Trump.

Despite the country having no recorded cases of Covid-19 so far, these bus passengers in Rwanda aren’t taking any chances.

As British airlines axed flights to and from Italy, pressure is mounting for the UK to ramp up its strategy to combat the coronavirus.

St Peter’s Square and St Peter’s Basilica have been closed to tourists and guided groups because of coronavirus but individual members of the faithful can enter the basilica to pray, the Vatican said.

A statement said the Vatican would also be closing its post office in the square, which draws many tourists, as well as its bookstore and photo service. A cafeteria inside the Vatican for employees would also close. All measures will remain in effect until 3 April.

Twenty-seven people have tested positive for the coronavirus in Scotland as of Tuesday morning, an increase of four from yesterday.

Scottish authorities have carried out 2,234 tests, of which 2,207 were confirmed negative.

The first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, warned of a “significant outbreak” across the UK on Monday. She said Scotland was anticipating an increase in the number of positive cases and added that the nation’s rurality would not necessarily protect it from the outbreak.

The local authority Lothian reported the highest number of positive cases – seven – followed by Grampian, which had six positive cases as of Tuesday morning.

The Scottish government published new workplace guidance this week that provides tips to people working in hotels and hospitality, leisure facilities, entertainment venues and premises used by community groups. The advice includes routine cleaning and disinfection of frequently touched objects and basic handwashing.

Sony is to delay the release of Peter Rabbit 2 until August amid coronavirus disruption, Variety reports.

Given the disruptions starting to emerge due to the coronavirus outbreak, Sony has moved to push back the sequel’s launch in the UK and European markets until 7 August.

President Emmanuel Macron of France has issued the following announcement, saying we each have an individual responsibility as we face Covid-19.

The number of Scots diagnosed with coronavirus has increased to 27, the Scottish government confirmed.

The total number of positive tests for the disease, known as Covid-19, has risen by four from Monday. So far, there have been 2,234 tests for the virus carried out in Scotland, of which 2,207 were negative.

Four new cases of Covid-19 have been detected in Northern Ireland, bringing the total number to 16, PA Media reports.

All four are adults. One case involved recent travel from northern Italy. Three can be traced to a previously reported case that involved recent travel to northern Italy.

A staff member at Aintree University hospital in Liverpool has tested positive for coronavirus. The Liverpool Echo reported the staff member was a male consultant surgeon who had returned from Italy.

A spokesman for Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust did not confirm or deny the report. He said: “A member of staff has been in self-isolation since being confirmed as positive for Covid-19.

“We have contacted all the patients that are identified as coming into contact with the staff member and are working with Public Health England (PHE) and NHS England to inform and advise those who may have come into contact with this individual.

“Aintree University hospital remains open and patients should attend their appointments as planned.”

Six people in Brunei have tested positive for the coronavirus after the tiny south-east Asian nation reported its first case a day ago, Reuters reports.

The first coronavirus patient in the sultanate was a 53-year-old Bruneian man who returned from the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, on 3 March and started showing symptoms four days later, Brunei’s health ministry said.

He was one of 90 Bruneians who attended a mass gathering of Islamic missionaries at a mosque in Kuala Lumpur. The health ministry has quarantined more than 20 individuals who came into close contact with the man, and is urging Bruneians who attended the gathering to come forward for testing.

In neighbouring Malaysia, the prime minister’s office said 12 more people tested positive on Tuesday, taking the total to 129.

The Spanish parliament’s lower house has suspended all activities for at least a week after lawmaker Javier Ortega Smith’s party Vox disclosed he was diagnosed with coronavirus, El País newspaper reported.

Ortega Smith, who is also the far-right party’s number two, participated in a large-scale political rally last weekend with the presence of many of the party’s other legislators. He and his 51 fellow lawmakers from the Vox party will work from home.

Reuters said officials in parliament could not immediately confirm the shutdown.

Public Health England has published a breakdown of Covid-19 cases by local authority in England, which can be viewed here.

It comes a week after a U-turn over a controversial decision to withhold information about the spread of the coronavirus.

Apple now says you can use alcohol wipes to clean your phone, after a decade of insisting it will damage the touchscreen if you use anything other than “a soft, lint-free cloth”.

In an update to its support pages, published on Monday, the company has added a specific box-out to answer the question: “Is it OK to use a disinfectant on my Apple product?” While the update is not specifically linked to coronavirus, it comes as experts around the world highlight the need for sanitation to prevent further spread of the virus.

“Using a 70% isopropyl alcohol wipe or clorox disinfecting wipes, you may gently wipe the hard, non-porous surfaces of your Apple product, such as the display, keyboard, or other exterior surfaces,” the company says. “Don’t use bleach. Avoid getting moisture in any opening, and don’t submerge your Apple product in any cleaning agents.”

Users had previously been warned that disinfectant wipes may damage the oleophobic coating on the screen, which helps keep them free of fingerprint smudges.

In Greece, calls are growing for the Greek Orthodox Church to listen to scientists on the issue of how best to deal with Covid-19 after it refused to suspend ecclesiastical services and sacred rites such as holy communion.

Debate over the church’s stance intensified after its governing body objected to any suggestion that the novel coronavirus could be transmitted when worshippers participated in shared rituals such as communion.

In a statement on Monday, the Holy Synod announced “with a sense of responsibility” that it would continue to hold services and conduct the sacrament despite public health concerns raised by the issue of shared chalices.

“For the members of the church, attendance of the divine eucharist and the shared cup of life, of course cannot be a cause of transmission of illness,” the body of senior clerics said in the statement. “Believers of all ages know that attending communion, even in the midst of a pandemic, is both a practical affirmation of self-surrender to the living god and a potent manifestation of love, which vanquishes every human and perhaps justified fear.”

Medical authorities, including the federation representing doctors’ unions, have decried what they described as the obscurantism of clerics invoking religious belief as a bulwark against the virus.

Possibly because of its influence as one of the most powerful institutions in a country where church and state have yet to be separated, the centre-right government has been slow to condemn the stance.

When asked during an interview on state-run TV what Greeks should do, Dora Bakoyannis, the former foreign minister and sister of the prime minister, Kyrakos Mitsotakis, said science had spoken and had to be listened to.

“I am a person who listens to experts and experts are saying very specific things, such as this virus is transmitted through human contact, through saliva etc,” she told the station. “Science has spoken,” she added, welcoming the news that some bishops were considering conducting open air services in the run-up to Orthodox Easter.

While the church has warned the faithful against kissing icons or clerics’ hands – traditions in eastern Orthodoxy – some say it is not enough.

Elias Mossialos, a professor of health policy at the London School of Economics, argued in an article for the Greek daily Ta Nea that the time had come for religious people to follow services on TV. “Vulnerable groups of believers who are the majority of those who go to church,” he wrote, referring to the older generation, “should watch services on television and holy communion should stop for the duration of the epidemic.”

Harvard University has told students not to return to its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the end of spring break on 23 March, when all classes will be conducted online.

Larry Bacow, Harvard’s president, told students and staff in a message this morning that the university is “transitioning to virtual instruction for graduate and undergraduate classes” and that non-essential gatherings will be limited to 25 people.

“To our students, I know it will be difficult to leave your friends and your classrooms. We are doing this not just to protect you but also to protect other members of or community who may be more vulnerable to this disease than you are,” Bacow said.

The full statement can be read here.

Trinity College Dublin is closing its lecture halls and other buildings amid the coronavirus threat.

In a statement posted on the university’s website, it said: “From tomorrow morning (Wednesday 11th), all lectures will be delivered online for the rest of the semester rather than physically in a lecture hall.

“However, tutorials, seminars and laboratory practicals will all continue to be given in the usual fashion while using social distancing protocols. This will allow Trinity to maintain continuity of teaching and learning while minimising the need to bring together students in large groups.

“This will slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus, but further measures may be necessary and these arrangements will be kept under continuous review.”

Alitalia is continuing to operate two services between Rome and London Heathrow today, tomorrow and in the coming days, airline sources have said.

It is also offering change fee waivers to anyone holding tickets for future travel to and from the country. More information here.

Austria is taking drastic measures in response to the nationwide lockdown in its southern neighbour Italy.

The chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, today announced an entry ban for people entering Austria from Italy by car, train or plane, unless they can provide a doctor’s certificate. Controls will be imposed along the border between the two countries.

Austrians visiting Italy would be allowed to return home if they agree to a two-week home quarantine. Cargo transport would be allowed to continue, though additional health checks would be put into place, Kurz said.

So far there have been 157 confirmed infections with the Covid-19 virus in the alpine state. “The number of infections in Austria is still very low, but the growth rates are enormous”, said Kurz. “The death rates in Italy are also high. The mortality rate is significantly higher than with the flu. Therefore we have been forced to set measures.”

Further measures put in place in Austria include a ban on outdoor events with more than 500 people and indoor events with more than 100 people, including private parties and weddings. For now, the ban is scheduled to last until April and will affect numerous sports events and trade fairs.

University teaching will be temporarily suspended, though schools and nurseries are for now to stay open.

Morocco has reported its first death from the coronavirus. The country’s health ministry confirmed on Tuesday the death in Casablanca, as its overall number of new infections rose to three.

The patient, who entered Morocco from Italy’s Bologna, is an 89-year-old Moroccan woman suffering from respiratory and heart diseases, the ministry said in a statement.

Morocco cancelled all trips to and from Italy, banned fans from attending football matches, and cancelled events involving foreign travellers and gatherings of more than 1,000 people as precautionary measures to avert an outbreak of the virus.

Iran’s health ministry spokesman today revealed record numbers of deaths and new confirmed cases. There have been 881 new infections in the past 24 hours, with 54 deaths. The number of confirmed cases has reached 8,042 and the total number of deaths 291.

Local hospitals, using different less stringent criteria, report higher numbers, and the government is still under criticism for failing to do more to quarantine the worst affected cities especially the spiritual city of Qom. Critics of the regime claim more than 150 have died in Tehran alone.

The health ministry has said it has no motive to massage the figures and points to an endorsement of its methods from the World Health Organization. The number of those that had recovered had reached 2,731.

But the president, Hassan Rouhani, today spoke to governors of some of the worst affected provinces of Gilan, Mazandaran and Qom to gain a frank assessment of the strains their local hospital services are suffering. The outbreak is nationwide but concentrated in the north and centre of the country.

Plans are being prepared to extend hospital to stadiums and other areas. The president is also looking into using armed force medical personnel to supplement strained local hospitals staff. Ironically, Iran, seen as a highly authoritarian state, has not taken the drastic emergency measures adopted in a country such as Italy, reflecting the many centres of power within the country. Qom, the epicentre of the outbreak has not bene fully quanatined.

Radio Farda, the US government-funded branch of Radio Free Europe. has claimed 200 people have died in the northern province of Gilan alone. In Qom, at least 120 people have died and in Isfahan 103. It claims the total number of deaths is 927.

In further measures, the culture ministry has closed all libraries museums and palaces.

The country itself is itself almost closed to its neighbours. Countries, including Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, have blocked joint borders with Iran and suspended foreign flights to Iran. Domestic airlines are also not allowed to fly abroad.

Efforts were also under way to dispel rumours that there are two types of coronavirus at present. Ayotallah Ali Khamenei has agreed to a health ministry proposal that doctors, medical staff and nurses that died treating coronavirus patients should be designated as martyrs.

Patrick Strzoda, Emmanuel Macron’s office director, is working from home awaiting the results of a coronavirus test after reportedly he came into contact with a person confirmed as having the virus last week.

The Élysée said it was a “precautionary measure vis-à-vis the president”, adding: ”He will be tested today or tomorrow. His deputy will carry on his work.”

The Evening Standard, which will be hitting the newsstands in London this lunchtime, picks up on the warning earlier from the country’s deputy chief medical officer that “many thousands of people” in the UK will contract coronavirus.

More from the Commons, where Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth is quizzing the UK government on its response to the coronavirus outbreak. Asked about the government’s advice to those with underlying health conditions and “what lessons the government has learned from the Italians on their handling of coronavirus to date and why we are taking a different approach”, the health minister Jo Churchill said:

So our approach as we’ve laid out from the beginning will be science-led and it will be about putting the safety of everybody – that’s why at some point in the future doctors will make decisions over clinical judgments and those with existing comorbidities or more serious ends of the illness will be triaged up into an appointment first.

And that may mean that some people have to wait a little longer during this period, but it will always be done on clinical advice and it will always be done with the safety of the patient at the heart.”

The latest from the European centre for disease prevention and control is that 14,890 cases have been reported in the EU/EEA and the UK: Italy (9,172), France (1,412), Spain (1,204), Germany (1,139), Netherlands (321), United Kingdom (321), Sweden (248), Belgium (239), Norway (192), Austria (131), Denmark (113), Greece (84), Iceland (65), Czech Republic (40), Finland (40), Portugal (39), Ireland (21), Poland (17), Romania (17), Slovenia (16), Croatia (12), Estonia (10), Hungary (9), Latvia (6), Luxembourg (5), Slovakia (5), Bulgaria (4), Malta (4), Cyprus (2), Liechtenstein (1) and Lithuania (1).

As of 10 March, 532 deaths have been reported in the EU/EEA and the UK: Italy (464), France (30), Spain (28), United Kingdom (5), Netherlands (3) and Germany (2).

The protocol for people returning to the UK from Italy – which is on a country-wide lockdown, is still unclear.

At Heathrow, Italian nationals and others who cannot easily self-isolate are being asked if they want to self-quarantine in a large nearby hotel, No 10 said on Tuesday. This is thought to be the Holiday Inn that has been used for some Chinese and South Korean passengers in recent weeks.

However, this is not compulsory so only some people are taking the government up on the offer. Return travellers therefore appear to be free to travel home via public transport, even though they are supposed to be self-isolating for 14 days. It is not known whether they are being offered masks to prevent fellow passengers from possible transmission. It is also unclear what the procedures are for those returning from other airports.

It is understood that Cobra will meet on Wednesday and Thursday this week.
The first meeting is to discuss emergency government legislation, the
second will discuss the next steps that might be taken. This is likely
to encompass advice for older people and those with higher risk
medical conditions.

GPs could be exempted from some rules about NHS form-filling to give them more time to help fight the spread of coronavirus, MPs have been told.

Responding to a question from Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, who asked if the government would suspend requirements for GPs to fill in forms relating to appraisals, and the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF), during the crisis, the health minister Jo Churchill replied: “I’m currently having those discussions to make sure that we can lift, within the bounds of making sure patients stay safe, all appropriate bureaucracy.”

In the UK, victims of race hate crimes linked to the coronavirus outbreak have been urged by police to come forward after a Chinese student’s jaw was dislocated in a street attack.

The student, in his 20s, was racially taunted and attacked in Birmingham after being approached by three men, according to West Midlands police. The incident occurred in the Harborne area, in the city’s south west, on 3 February.

It comes after the Guardian reported last month that a spate of racist incidents linked to the coronavirus outbreak were being investigated by police, prompting fears among members of the Chinese community that they will face abuse if they wear face masks.

Addressing the need for victims to come forward following the incident in Birmingham, a West Midlands police spokeswoman said:

We are aware of a small number of hate crime cases of a racially aggravated nature involving abuse connected to coronavirus. We are also aware that there may be incidents that are not being reported to us.

We take all reports of hate crime seriously and, in order to respond to this, we need to know about it.”

Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis, who was at the Championship football team’s home game on Friday alongside more than 27,000 fans, has reportedly contracted coronavirus.

The 52-year-old Greek businessman announced the news in an Instagram post, writing to his 49,000 followers: “The recent virus gas ‘visited’ me and I felt obliged to let the public know. I feel good as I take all the necessary measures and I discipline to the doctors’ instructions. I strongly advise all my all my fellow citizens to do the same. I wish all a quick recovery.”

British Airways is contacting passengers whose upcoming trips to Italy fall within the quarantine period, telling them that, in light of the updated Foreign Office advice to avoid all but essential travel to Italy, flights are being cancelled and customers refunded, the Guardian understands.

Matt Hancock, the UK health secretary, is inviting members of the public to submit questions on the coronavirus via his Instagram account.

A very moving tweet from a presenter in Ireland, putting into perspective the human impact as the coronavirus outbreak unfolds – “Big stats, a million individual heartbreaks.”

As the number of coronavirus patients in Germany rose to 1,295 this morning (up to date as of midday local time), and after the first two deaths in the country of a 78-year-old and an 89-year-old announced yesterday, Jens Spahn, the health minister, urged people to show solidarity towards each other despite the restrictions to their daily lives.

“We will conquer this situation, by helping each other, working together and having trust in each other even when we are in a state of stress,” he wrote in a guest commentary for Germany’s widest read newspaper, the tabloid Bild. “We can do it, and best of all is if we do it together,” he added.

The peak of the epidemic in Germany has not yet been reached, he said. “We are expecting a rise in the number of infections, and we will continue to face further restrictions in our daily lives.” Having recommended at the weekend, like the French authorities, that all gatherings of 1,000 people or more should be cancelled, Spahn said: “It’s clear, our safety is more important than anything else, even economic interests. But restricting public life is no easy decision. Openness belongs to democracy, and it should remain that way. Which is why we must proceed with caution and calm.”

Lothar Wieler, the president of the Robert Koch Institute, the leading health and safety advisory body in Germany, has called on the country’s community leaders and hospitals to activate their emergency plans and start preparing for an epidemic. “The situation is serious,” Wieler said.

Hospitals should increase the amount of emergency beds as far as possible, and have sufficient breathing apparatus to hand, he said. They need to ensure that patients with suspected coronavirus can be admitted and cared for in a separate part of the hospital to other patients and to assign a specific section of the medical staff to solely treat coronavirus patients.

The Marshall Islands and Samoa are among several countries to have banned German citizens or people who have been in Germany recently, while Liberia, Uganda and Russia have said travellers from Germany have to spend two weeks in quarantine – in the case of Liberia, in a state-run institution – before they are allowed to stay.

Meanwhile, a much-anticipated Bundesliga football match between Borussia Mönchengladbach and FC1 Köln, rescheduled because of the recent cyclone Sabine, is to go ahead on Wednesday evening, but without any spectators, in line with restrictions which also face Champions League and Europe League matches, the German football federation (DFL) announced.

Payments on mortgages are to be suspended in Italy, the Independent reports the country’s government has announced.

The deputy economic minister, Laura Castelli, confirmed to Radio Anch’io that it would be the case for individuals and households.

More than 400 people have died in Italy after contracting the coronavirus, and the total number of infections leaped to 9,172 at the start of this week.

New York University has become the latest US university to announce it will stop in-person teaching and switch to remote learning for all of its 50,000 students from tomorrow.

The university also said that “non-essential“ events and meetings at its Manhattan and other US campuses would be stopped, and staff were barred from any non-essential travel to California and Washington states as well as to countries affected by coronavirus.

Last week, several universities on the west coast of the US, including Stanford, announced they were switching to remote learning, and this week several in the east coast are following suit, including NYU, Colombia and Princeton.

In the UK, universities are preparing themselves for remote learning, including video lectures and online seminars, with an expectation that many will not reopen their campuses to students after the Easter holidays if the spread of Covid-19 continues.

Hong Kong will quarantine all visitors from Italy and parts of France, Germany and Japan for two weeks from 13 March to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the French consulate in the city has said.

Visitors from Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and Grand Est in France, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany, and Hokkaido in Japan will be quarantined from midnight on Friday, it said.

In case you missed it …

The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, told the country’s 17 million residents to stop shaking hands to help combat coronavirus, then immediately broke the new rule.

“From now on we stop shaking hands,” he said during a Monday evening news conference. “You can foot-tap or elbow-bump, or whatever you can come up with … but from today on we are going to stop shaking hands.”

Minutes later Rutte turned and enthusiastically shook the hand of Jaap van Dissel, the head of the Dutch centre for infectious disease control who was also giving the press conference.

“Sorry, sorry! No, that’s not allowed! Let’s do that again,” Rutte said, breaking into a laugh.

The Netherlands had reported 321 confirmed cases of coronavirus as of Monday.

All air traffic to Denmark from areas severely hit by coronavirus, will cease later on today, the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has said.

“Effective from later today, all air traffic to Denmark from red areas will be suspended,” she said, referring to areas hard hit by the coronavirus such as northern Italy, Iran and South Korea.

Serbia has closed its borders to travellers from countries most affected by the coronavirus outbreak to prevent the spread of the disease, the government has said in a statement.

The temporary ban applies to people arriving from Italy, certain provinces in China, South Korea, Iran and Switzerland, it said. The government did not say when the ban would be lifted.

So far, four people in Serbia, including a Chinese national, have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Barcelona’s Champions League match with Napoli will take place without spectators due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus. More details to follow …

Kazakhstan has barred entry to travellers from Italy over coronavirus and is adding France, Germany, and Spain to the list from 12 March, Reuters reports chief sanitary doctor Zhandarbek Bekshin as saying. There are so far reported no cases in the country.

Lebanon has recorded its first death from the coronavirus, local broadcasters said, adding that the patient had been in quarantine since returning from Egypt.

The government has halted flights for non-residents from centres of the outbreak, shut schools and warned against public gatherings as the total number of cases rose to 41 this week.

Stormont’s leaders have cancelled plans to travel to the US later this week to attend St Patrick’s Day events in Washington DC, the deputy first minister, Michelle O’Neill, said.

O’Neill and the first minister, Arlene Foster, were due to fly to the US capital on Wednesday. They had already cancelled the New York leg of their itinerary.

“We remain in the containment stage. However, as leaders of the executive we have decided to suspend our travel to the United States this week since our full attention is on civil contingency planning around the coronavirus outbreak and protecting public health,” said O’Neill.

“We are fully engaged in the Cobra meetings alongside England, Scotland and Wales in assessing the response to the outbreak on advice from our chief medical officer.

“There is all-Ireland co-ordination between health and medical professionals on a daily basis also. I am in regular contact with tánaiste (deputy head of the government) Simon Coveney and health ministers north and south are also working closely.”

The Czech Republic is to close schools indefinitely and ban events hosting more than 100 people in measures to contain the coronavirus, its prime minister said on Tuesday.

The country has reported 40 cases of coronavirus since detecting the first infections on 1 March. In most cases, the virus appeared in people coming from northern Italy, the worst-hit area of Europe.

“Our paramount task is the health of our citizens,” the prime minister, Andrej Babis, told a news conference. “We understand this will be very unpleasant for people, but we want to prevent, by all means, what happened in Italy from happening here.”

Officials said the measures were decided after a Prague taxi driver was diagnosed with the disease, the first case where the source of infection could not be identified.

The new measures will close schools and universities, but not kindergartens, from Wednesday. A ban from Tuesday night on events ranges from film and theatre to other cultural, sports and religious gatherings.

The Czech government has already banned flights with Italy, and issued mandatory quarantines for thousands returning from vacation in the southern European country.

On Monday, it banned hospital and retirement home visits, and started border checks including taking temperatures and testing any foreign travellers feeling ill.

British Airways has cancelled all flights to and from Italy, Reuters is reporting.

The European Commissioner for crisis management, Janez Lenarčič, has told MEPs sitting in Brussels that “the economic cost of coronavirus will be significant”.

He said: “We are well aware that exceptional times require exceptional measures and this is such a time. This situation calls for a coherent response and solidarity and cooperation are essential”.

Great Ormond Street children’s hospital has cancelled surgery on children with serious heart problems for two weeks after a health professional there contracted the coronavirus.

The London hospital, which treats seriously ill children from all over the UK, has also cancelled outpatient clinics for under-18s with cardiac conditions.

It is the latest NHS hospital which has had to curtail its services because a member of staff has tested positive for the virus. Last weekend Southampton general hospital had to close its surgical high dependency unit to new admissions after a health professional was found to have the virus.

Great Ormond Street did not name the health professional involved in a statement it posted on its website on Monday or indicate if it was a doctor, nurse or other member of staff.

It is one of the best-known hospitals in the world and treats some children from overseas, especially the Middle East. It is one of the NHS’s network of dedicated children’s hospitals. It has featured in many television documentaries, including the 2015 BBC series Great Ormond Street.

In its statement it said only that: “A healthcare professional who works in our cardiology department has tested positive for coronavirus (COVID-19).

“We would like to reassure our families that anybody who came into close contact with this individual is being informed and will be offered advice.”

It added: “The majority of services are unaffected and all essential treatment is being carried out, and to ensure patient and staff safety the cardiology department will not be carrying out non-essential cardiac procedures including surgery and outpatients.

“This is for a period of two weeks from Monday 9 March and will be subject to daily review. Any patient affected by this change will be contacted directly.”

The hospital did not say if any patients or other staff were now in isolation following the health worker’s diagnosis.

Its statement said only that: “The trust is working with Public Health England and implementing NHS guidance to control risk from the virus. Patients and staff should continue to attend appointments normally and come into work unless they are unwell or advised not to.”

The president of the European parliament, David Sassoli, has said he will work from home for the next two weeks after visiting Italy on the weekend.

Sassoli, who is from Florence, said in a statement: “The new advice introduced by the Italian government extends the protected area to the whole national territory. This has important consequences for the behaviour of Italian MEPs.

“For this reason, I have decided after having been in Italy over the last weekend, as a precaution, to follow the indicated measures and to exercise my function as President from my home in Brussels in compliance with the 14 days indicated by the health protocol.

“Covid-19 obliges everyone to be responsible and to be cautious. It is a delicate moment for all of us. Parliament will continue to work to exercise its duties. No virus can block democracy.”

Poland’s government has decided to cancel all mass events due to the coronavirus outbreak, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said.

“At this morning’s meeting we took a decision to call off all mass events,” Morawiecki told a news conference.

The central European country of 38 million people has reported 17 cases of Covid-19.

A call centre in Belfast has closed for deep cleaning after a staff member tested positive for Covid-19, PA Media reports.

About 1,000 people work at the Halifax operation in the Gasworks area of the city. It is understood staff have been asked to self-isolate, work from home or from a contingency site.

Lloyds Banking Group, which owns Halifax, said: “The Belfast Gasworks building has been temporarily closed to allow for the appropriate areas of the site to be cleaned, after a colleague based there was diagnosed with Covid-19.

“Our priority is the wellbeing of the individual, as well as the colleagues and visitors to the building. We’re closely monitoring the developing situation and continue to follow official guidelines.”

Pope Francis has urged Catholic priests on Tuesday to “have the courage” to go out and help those sickened by the novel coronavirus, hours after Italy was placed on a nationwide lockdown.

“Let us pray to the Lord also for our priests, that they may have the courage to go out and visit the sick … and to accompany the medical staff and volunteers in the work they do,” the pontiff said during a mass in Vatican City.

St Peter’s Square in the Vatican was almost empty on Tuesday with only a few dozen people walking around, most of them without masks.

The Italian government has asked for people not to travel if they can avoid it and to avoid contact with the sick.

Officials passed a decree late Monday extending nationwide restrictive measures that had been put in place at the weekend in the hardest-hit northern regions.

The restrictions – including checkpoints on roads and in railway stations – are set to remain until 3 April.

Italy is the epicentre of the European virus outbreak, with more than 9,000 cases and 463 deaths so far.

In Greece this morning, the number of confirmed cases has risen from 84 to 89 overnight, according to the country’s health ministry.

One of the cases, it said, had been “imported” from London. Medical authorities, who confirmed the first case of the novel virus in Greece on 23 February, described the condition of a 65-year-old man battling pneumonia in a hospital isolation unit in the western port city of Patras as being “very serious.” He had been among a group of Greeks who contracted coronavirus after travelling to Israel and Egypt on a tour of religious sites.

Of the total, 27 were hospitalised in specialist units and 57 were in isolation at home, the health ministry said.

On Monday, it was confirmed that a 40-year-old woman on Lesbos had also been infected following a trip to Israel. Local authorities ordered the school attended by her two children in the resort town of Plomari to be closed amid fears of an outbreak on the island, which is hosting 27,000 migrants and refugees – most in appalling conditions in Moria, the reception centre outside Mytilene, the port capital. MPs have called for the local health system, already vastly overstretched, to be bolstered with more doctors, saying Mytilene’s hospital barely has room to cope with six coronavirus patients raising the spectre of meltdown if more people test positive.

The rise in numbers came as the first case of coronavirus was also confirmed in the Turkish-run breakaway republic of northern Cyprus. Turkey’s Anadolu news agency reported that a German woman, on holiday in the rump state, had contracted the virus. On Monday, authorities in the island’s internationally recognised south announced the first two cases of coronavirus, including a prominent heart surgeon believed to have been infected on a recent trip to London.

• This post was amended on 10 March 2020. An earlier version said the infection rate was 89, when this was actually the number of confirmed cases. This has been corrected.

Moldova has banned all foreigners from entering by plane from any country affected by the coronavirus. The ban took effect on Tuesday, three days after the eastern European state reported its first coronavirus case.

Announcing the move late on Monday, the prime minister, Ion Chicu, said the country could not completely ban flights, but that only Moldovan citizens would be permitted to board planes departing for Moldova from virus-infected countries.

It was not immediately clear how the ban would be implemented. More than 100 countries and territories have reported cases of the new coronavirus, Covid-19.

Moldova’s first case, a 48-year-old woman, was critically ill with acute respiratory failure, the health ministry said on Tuesday. She had been hospitalised after arriving from Italy by plane on Saturday.

The French culture minister, Franck Riester, has tested positive for the coronavirus. He said he is self-quarantining. Riester is the first high-profile French politician to confirm he has tested positive, but five MPs from the Assemblée National and two other parliamentary members of staff are among those who have the virus.

The French health authority in its daily briefing on Monday evening said there were now 1,412 cases in France, a jump of 286 on the previous day. There have been 25 deaths: 10 women and 15 men. Of those who have died, 21 were aged over 70. There are seven clusters of virus cases including a new cluster at Ajaccio, capital of Corsica, where 38 new cases have been confirmed.

France is still at stage 2 of its disease alert, but officials admit that stage 3 is looking increasingly inevitable.

As the whole of Italy goes into lockdown, there are some reassuring signs that measures are starting to work. Across the 11 towns that went into quarantine more than two weeks ago, the number of cases is beginning to fall.

“In the province of Lodi, and even more so, in Codogno, there’s a net reduction in the number of positive cases,” said Giulio Galleria, the welfare councillor for Lombardy, the region worst affected.

The 38-year-old man from Codogno, who was Italy’s first locally transmitted case, was moved out of intensive care on Monday. The number of people to have so far overcome the virus is 724.

Virgin Atlantic has called on the European commission and UK flight slots co-ordinator to relax rules amid the coronavirus outbreak, PA Media reports.

Its chief executive, Shai Weiss, said: “Last month Virgin Atlantic and industry partners committed to achieving net zero carbon by 2050. Passenger demand for air travel has dramatically fallen due to Covid-19 and in some instances we are being forced to fly almost empty planes or lose our valuable slots.

“In the aftermath of 9/11 and following the outbreak of Sars, slot rules were quickly relaxed. Yet today, where the demand impact is greater, we only see short-term alleviation on slots used to fly to China and Hong Kong.

“Given the almost unprecedented impact on global passenger demand, the UK slot co-ordinator and the European commission need to now urgently relax the rules for the whole summer. Common sense must prevail.”

The UK will see “many thousands of people” contract coronavirus, the deputy chief medical officer told Sky today.

Dr Jenny Harries said the fatality rate will rise before it drops again in the early stages of the outbreak.

Speaking to Sky’s Kay Burley @ Breakfast, Harries said:

We will have significant numbers in a way which I think the country is not used to … so large numbers of the population will become infected but because it’s a naive population, nobody has got antibodies to this virus currently.

Having said that, 99% of those will almost certainly get better and most people will have a really quite mild disease and will not need to be in hospital and can be managed very safely and appropriately at home.

The important thing for us is to make sure that we manage those infections and make sure that those individuals who are most affected … elderly people, particularly those with chronic underlying conditions, get in touch and get treatment and we support other people in the home environment.

Italian doctors celebrated a small victory in their battle against the coronavirus after a 38-year-old man was moved out of intensive care for the first time since he tested positive on 21 February and opened Italy’s health care crisis as Patient No 1, AP reports.

But in the rest of hard-hit northern Italy, the virus spread continues to grow exponentially. Speaking to SkyTg24, Dr Massimo Galli, head of infectious disease at Milans Sacco hospital, noted that the numbers of infections registered in Lombardy last week were similar to those in Wuhan, China in late January.

Galli noted that Wuhan is a concentrated metropolis of 11 million and Lombardy is spread out. But the numbers tell you that the diffusion is a real possibility, he warned.

Also alarming was Italys high fatality rate: With 463 dead and 9,172 infected, Italy’s fatality rate is running at 5% nationwide and 6% in Lombardy, far higher than the 3%-4% estimates elsewhere.

Norwegian Air has temporarily halted its flights to and from Italy because of the coronavirus outbreak, the company said on Tuesday.

Austria has advised citizens to return home from Italy, its southern neighbour, as the Italian government imposes a nationwide lockdown until next month in a new attempt to beat the coronavirus in Europe’s worst-affected country.

“Austrian travellers are urgently advised to return to Austria,” the foreign ministry said on its website on Tuesday.

There’s a new coronavirus meme in town, which matches the illustrations on a coronavirus hand washing advice poster to song lyrics.

Here is Smash Mouth’s All Star:

A more dystopian-feeling The Beatles’ Nowhere Man:

Queen’s Under Pressure (aren’t we all):

In Australia, here is more news on the drive-through coronavirus testing station in Adelaide, South Australia we reported on earlier.

The country’s first drive-through coronavirus testing station has been set up at an Adelaide hospital.

It is one of two formal clinics of its kind that exists globally, although a Melbourne doctor runs a solo operation with a similar structure in the car park outside his practice, AAP reports.

Patients will drive through the site at the Repatriation Hospital, wind down their windows and be tested directly out of the car window by pathology nurses.

Those tested will have a swab taken from the back of their throat and nose from the comfort of their driver’s seat.

The service is only offered for people referred by their general practitioner.

The station will be open up to nine hours a day, testing patients once every 20 minutes.

South Korea on Tuesday reported fewer than 150 new cases for the first time in two weeks.

A total of 131 infections were confirmed on Monday, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Three more people died, it added, taking the death toll to 54.

Monday’s final figure marked the fourth consecutive daily fall and was the lowest for a single day since late February.

“The number of new Covid-19 cases has been declining, so we can assess the rate of increase is coming to a standstill,” said Yoon Tae-ho at the Central Disaster Management Headquarters.

But the outbreak was still spreading, he added, warning against any relaxation of containment efforts.

Cyprus’ largest hospital suspended most services on Tuesday, authorities said, after a medical doctor heading the heart surgical ward tested positive for coronavirus, Reuters reports.

The 64-year-old doctor was one of two individuals first to test positive on the Mediterranean island. He had recently returned from Britain and had contact with patients.

Effective Tuesday, all admissions, outpatient clinics, surgeries and visitations at Nicosia general hospital were suspended for 48 hours, when the situation would be reviewed, the health ministry announced early on Tuesday.

The operation of the cardio surgery ward had also been suspended and patients would be gradually discharged, depending on their general health condition, the ministry said.

The Australian Labor Party warning the government not to drag its feet on help for casual workers in the midst of a looming coronavirus employment crisis, after a roundtable discussion on the issue led to no concrete solutions for vulnerable employees.

Labor MPs Tony Burke and Linda Burney said Australia’s 3.3 million casual and contract workforce could not afford to wait to learn whether or not they would be paid sick leave in the event they were forced to self-isolate for two weeks.

“If casuals aren’t given that reassurance sooner rather than later we run the risk people will turn up to work when they’re sick because they simply cannot afford to stay home and lose their pay,” the Labor MPs said.

“This isn’t just about supporting Australia’s often vulnerable or insecure casual workers – it’s about containing the spread of this virus.”

In Italy, here is another reaction from the country under lockdown, or #ItaliaZonaRossa.

“Let’s take a moment to think about the people who fled the red zone to wake up in the red zone”, says this user:

In Italy, here are a few of the lockdown rules imposed on 60 million people in the country, as reported by AFP.

Don’t Travel

From Tuesday, the movements of Italy’s population of 60 million are severely limited. Travel is only allowed for “urgent, verifiable work situations and emergencies or health reasons”.

People who have tested positive for Covid-19 must not leave their homes for any reason.

To avoid work-related travel, public and private companies have been urged to put their staff on leave.

Gatherings cancelled

The latest decree prohibits “all forms of gatherings in public places or sites open to the public” – going further than the rules that went into force over the weekend in large parts of northern Italy.

Sporting events of all levels and disciplines were cancelled, stopping play in the top-flight Serie-A football league.

Venues closed

To encourage people to stay in, bars and restaurants are only allowed to open between 6am and 6pm, and only if it is possible to keep a distance of at least a metre between customers.

While supermarkets will remain open, large shopping centres and department stores must close on public holidays and the day before public holidays.

School’s out

Schools and universities are closed, and all exams cancelled.

Religious institutions will stay open, as long as people can stay a metre from one another – but ceremonies such as marriages, baptisms and funerals are banned.

As Italians wake up to their first day of nationwide lockdown this morning, people are posting pictures online of the queues outside supermarkets.

Some are criticising the rush to the shops. One user tweeted in Italian of the queues (roughly translated):

“And after the young people who went to have a drink, tonight Conte communicates that all of Italy is a red zone and that one must avoid going out, the Italian cares and goes to queue at the supermarket. WE DESERVE TO BE THE JOKE OF ALL EUROPE.”

Staying with China for now: the soaring price of pork and other food, as well as the rising cost of medical supplies during the coronavirus outbreak kept Chinese consumer inflation close to eight year highs in February, officials said Monday.

Analysts said the figure would likely remain elevated for some time as measures put in place around the country to contain the deadly outbreak have put a huge dent in supplies of key goods.

Consumer inflation rose 5.2 percent on-year last month, slightly down from 5.4 percent the month before, which was the highest since October 2011. The reading was in line forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey.

Food prices rose almost 22 percent, with pork increasing 135 percent – following a 116 percent rise in January – as the country’s pig herds are ravaged by African Swine Fever that has seen millions of pigs culled.

More on Xi’s visit to Wuhan and the state of the outbreak in China:

“It is obvious that Xi could not have visited Wuhan earlier because the risk of him contracting the virus there was too high initially,” said Professor Zhang Ming of Renmin University. “He is there now to reap the harvest.”

In other signs that officials feel the tide has turned, on Tuesday, China’s Hubei province said it was studying plans to allow people in medium- or low-risk areas to begin travelling.

According to the official Hubei Daily, authorities may begin using “health code”, a mobile-based system that assigns individuals colours that determine if they are safe to travel.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Wuhan on Tuesday is “a major sign that officials believe the outbreak is under control,” the AFP reports.

Xi’s unannounced visit comes as unprecedented quarantine measures that have sealed off Wuhan and the rest of central Hubei province since late January appear to have paid off, with new infections dropping dramatically in recent weeks.

China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong is usually a daily fixture in state media but has stayed out of the spotlight for much of the crisis and assigned Premier Li Keqiang to oversee the response to the epidemic.

Li and a vice premier have already visited the virus-stricken city of Wuhan.

But as the number of new cases has fallen in recent weeks, state media has played up Xi’s role in the fight against the outbreak, releasing a speech last month in which he said he had been giving instructions since early January.

Authorities have faced rare and fierce criticism online over their handling of the virus, with local officials coming under particular scrutiny for punishing whistleblowers in an apparent attempt to cover up the outbreak in early January.

The Philippines’ Rappler news reports that AirAsia is offering 6 million seats at a one-way base fare of a single Philippine Peso, which I’ve calculated as roughly one fifth of one US Dollar, or 0.02c.

In other news of the effects of the coronavirus outbreak on the world’s airlines, Boeing Co. shares dropped more than 12% on Monday amid a broader market plunge as pressure mounted on global aviation from the spread of the coronavirus and U.S. regulators said they disagreed with Boeing’s argument about the safety of wiring bundles on the grounded 737 MAX jet.

Boeing Co said late on Monday an employee at its Everett facility in Washington state has tested positive for the coronavirus and has now been quarantined.

“As a precaution, we’ve asked all coworkers of the employee who were in close contact to remain home to self-quarantine and self-monitor,” the company said

Underscoring the global risks for America’s largest exporter, Ethiopian investigators singled out faulty 737 MAX systems in a new interim report on last year’s crash, the second of two fatal accidents that plunged Boeing into its worst-ever crisis.

Western Australia health minister Roger Cook says there are six confirmed cases in the state, and that the patients are in isolation. He added that the three new WA clinics dedicated to testing for coronavirus “remain busy, as we expected them to be, but so far they’re working... to do some diversion away from our emergency departments.”

He said we will be hearing from WA’s Chief Health Officer at 14:30 western time (17:30 eastern).

In Western Australia, health minister Roger Cook is addressing the media regarding the outbreak in the state.

We “have already seen a school be shut down in New South Wales. So it is inevitable that at some point in Western Australia there will be a child, a student, who will contract the virus,” he says.

In Australia, here’s a wrap of that press conference earlier with chief medical officer Brendan Murphy and health officer Greg Hunt.

The key message from the Australian government today is “upscaling”. With 100 confirmed cases now in Australia, the government is upscaling, the states are upscaling, general practitioners are upscaling.

More concretely, the government is reviewing travel advisories for Australians to Italy, which Hunt said in the press conference just now will be forthcoming in the next 24 hours. It’s also boosting staff to the inundated coronavirus information hotline, that has been struggling with the volume of calls over the past few days.

Murphy sought to clarify questions around who should or should not present for testing for the virus.

“Our focus at the moment is testing people who are returned travellers who have acute respiratory symptoms, cough sore throat and the like, and contacts of confirmed cases,” Murphy said.

“At the moment we are not recommending that general members of the community with acute respiratory symptoms – colds, flu, and the like – be tested.”

Murphy also sought to downplay fears regarding Australia’s status health-wise.

“In Australia, our situation is very much the same as it’s been over the last few days,” he said.

There were no recommendations yet for a complete lockdown of any areas of Australia.

In Victoria, Australia, authorities have confirmed three new cases of coronavirus in the state, bringing the total number of cases to 18.

The 16th case is a man in his 70s who returned to Melbourne from Singapore on March 6 at 12.15 am on flight EK404, Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton has confirmed.

“The flight manifest of EK404 is being obtained to begin contact tracing of passengers in the same and adjacent rows. He had earlier travelled to Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Singapore.”

The 17th case is a household contact of a confirmed Victorian case of Covid-19 who returned on the February 28 flight UA60 from the United States.

She is understood to be the first documented case of patient-to-patient transmission in the state, Dr. Sutton confirmed.

The 18th case is a a man in his 70s who arrived home in Melbourne from Los Angeles on March 8 on flight VA24. He presented to hospital for testing immediately and is now isolated at home with one household contact.

Contact tracing of passengers in the same and adjacent rows on the flight has begun.

Earlier, Victorian authorities said the state’s Coronavirus Hotline (1800 675 398) and Nurse-On-Call Hotline 1300 60 60 24 were experiencing system issues due to extraordinary call volumes.

Just doubling back to the beginning of that news conference, Greg Hunt, the Australian health minister, also medical experts were reviewing the status of Italian travel advisories. An update on that is expected in the next 24 hours.

Addressing concerns expressed by casual workers or workers who do not have sick cover, Hunt said the attorney general and industrial relations minister, along with the chief medical officer, met at around table with employers and employees to discuss maintaining the workforce and “helping those people who are within the workforce that, at some stage, are affected by the virus in terms of their continuity of employment.”

I expect we will here more on this in the coming days, given that millions of Australians may not have access to sick cover from their work.

Australia’s health minister, Greg Hunt, says this is a once in 50 year challenge and that Australians should take heart from the current understanding that people can only get this disease once. And, as such, this crisis will pass.

Australia’s health minister, Greg Hunt, says efforts to contain the virus so far has been a great community effort.

Now we are entering a period where there are more people who will be in contact, and more people who will be affected. And so this is the moment where, collectively, all of us have to again show that spirit from the summer of supporting each other and recognising that whilst there are challenges, we will absolutely get through this.

The next question is about clinics being set up to treat potential patients. Greg Hunt, Australia’s health minister, says there are four hospitals in the state of Victoria who are operating clinics. The Gold Coast (in the northern state of Queensland) has them, he says and New South Wales is undertaking its own operations.

He emphasises that people can call state or national hotlines for information.

Brendan Murphy, the chief medical officer, says the national hotline will be given a very clear script of information and GPs will have access to this too.

We will make sure that that information is well out there in the hotline, well out there in the minds of GPs, and make sure that those private pathology labs who are now gearing up to take on the testing, which was initially done just by the public health labs, have identified those collection centres where they are going to do them, and that information will be made readily available within days to all health professionals.

Prof Brendan Murphy is being asked how testing is done in Australia and he said it’s done by getting a swap from the nose or throat or lung. He says the testing kit is looking for the genetic material of the virus and the current method is very reliable.

The next question is about whether Australia should introduce a large quarantine area like Italy has. done. Greg Hunt, the country’s health minister, says they are following the advice of medical experts. He doesn’t exactly answer the question, but Murphy, the chief medical officer, is now saying he doesn’t think mass quarantine is merited, given the current low level of community transmission.

If we had more sustained community transmission, then we wouldn’t hesitate to make recommendations about public gatherings, schools and the like. We only had that one issue of community transition in Ryde. I can imagine how the doctor would feel motivated to do more strenuous measures. But we are reviewing this every single day.

Brendan Murphy, Australia’s chief medical officer, says that with this type of virus in general, once you have been infected, you are likely to develop immunity.

This type of virus, in general, you would expect that once you’ve had an infection, produced immunity to it, you wouldn’t be susceptible to reinfection. The reason influenza, you can be susceptible to reinfection, is the virus mutates all the time very rapidly. These types of virus, which is related to the SARS and MERS virus, tend not to have the same sort of mutation. But we still aren’t absolutely sure, as the Minister said, but we think it’s unlikely that someone who’s cleared an infection would be susceptible to reinfection.

Both men are asking about whether people can be reinfected. Hunt says: “It is highly unlikely that people can be reinfected.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has not been tested for the coronavirus, the White House said on Monday, though at least two lawmakers with whom he has recently come into contact have announced they were self-quarantining after attending a conference with a person who had tested positive for the virus, Reuters reports.

“The President has not received Covid-19 testing because he has neither had prolonged close contact with any known confirmed Covid-19 patients, nor does he have any symptoms. President Trump remains in excellent health, and his physician will continue to closely monitor him,” White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a statement.

Mongolia said on Tuesday that a French national working in the country has been confirmed to be infected with coronavirus, marking the country’s first case.

The National Emergency Commission said in a statement the patient, a 57-year-old man, travelled to Mongolia from France and transited through Moscow. The government has identified 42 people the patient has met with and another 120 individuals who had close contact with the patient, who works for Badrakh Energy in southern Dornogovi province and is in stable condition.

Mongolia has suspended all local travel in Dornogovi province, the commission said.

The infection comes despite stringent border and travel controls imposed by Ulaanbaatar to keep out the virus.

Mongolia has halted border crossings from China, imposed travel bans on people from Japan and South Korea until March 11 and suspended schools through end-March.

Mongolian President Battulga Khaltmaa and other government officials submitted to a 14-day quarantine in late February after returning home from their visit to China as a precautionary measure.

Emergency workers are still working to find 12 people after a hotel in Quanzhou in Fujian province, used in part as a quarantine centre, collapsed on Saturday night. A total of 18 people have died, according to the latest update.

Part of Beijing Capital Airport is to be sectioned off for flights coming from countries severely affected by the virus so that travellers can be more thoroughly screened, according to a meeting held by officials in Beijing on Monday afternoon. They did not say when this would start.

China’s ministry of emergency management said on Tuesday that three emergency services officials in Tianjin, Shandong, and Henan had died from “overwork”. The ministry said the three “sacrificed themselves on the frontline”. I tweeted about it here.

France’s culture minister, Franck Riester, has become the latest French politician to contract the coronavirus, a government colleague said on Monday, after several lawmakers were diagnosed with coronavirus.

Riester is doing well and resting at home, health minister Olivier Veran said on BFM Television.

Five French parliamentarians have been diagnosed with the coronavirus, according to media reports on Monday, along with a worker in the National Assembly cafeteria where some or all of the lawmakers may have picked it up.

Riester may have caught the virus from one of the five parliamentarians, culture ministry sources said. The stricken minister last met President Emmanuel Macron several days ago, they added.

“Nobody has been shaking hands in cabinet meetings for the last two weeks,” Veran said.

Passengers aboard the ill-fated Grand Princess cruise ship, on which 19 crew members and two passengers tested positive for the coronavirus, have made it to dry land, the Guardian’s Mario Koran reports.

Just before noon the ship passed beneath the iconic red beams of the Golden Gate bridge to the applause of passengers.

The ship steamed toward the port of Oakland, where officials fenced off a 10-acre (four hectare) area in preparation of the landing.

The nearly 1,000 passengers who are California residents will head to in-state military bases, while residents of other states will complete the mandatory quarantine at Joint Base San Antonio Lackland in Texas or Dobbins air force base in Georgia, federal health officials said.

Bay-area resident Michelle Heckert, who was quarantined as a passenger on the ship, had been sharing songs about her experience aboard the Grand Princess. She said shipmates she had spoken with seemed to be in generally good spirits despite having to remain in their rooms.

“Most of the passengers I’ve been in contact with seem to be positive or at least trying to remain calm. Our balcony neighbors seem cheery, especially when they can go out and enjoy the sun. It feels like maybe the ship is more calm than outside viewers,” she said.

“Obviously people would love to get off, but we still have 14 days of quarantine, so it’s a bit bittersweet.”

The Seattle-area nursing home at the epicenter of one of the biggest coronavirus outbreaks in the United States said on Monday it had no kits to test 65 employees showing symptoms of the respiratory illness that has killed at least 13 patients at the long-term care center, Reuters reports.

The staff in question, representing more than a third of the Life Care Center’s 180 employees, are out sick with symptoms consistent with coronavirus, and a federal strike team of nurses and doctors is helping to care for 53 patients remaining in the center.

With the facility in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland accounting for more than half of the known U.S. coronavirus deaths, and all its patients tested, it was unclear why Life Care lacked diagnostic kits for staff, even as the University of Washington offered to process test samples for them.

Twenty-six of 120 patients who were residing at the nursing home as of Feb. 19 have since died, with 13 of 15 autopsies carried conducted to date confirming coronavirus was the cause, Life Care officials said on Monday.

Among 53 residents still in the facility as of Monday, results for 31 out of 35 tested have so far come back positive for the coronavirus, they said.

Washington as a whole has documented 162 confirmed cases, one of the largest tally of any single U.S. state. The nationwide number has surpassed 600.

In Adelaide, Australia, 10 News First is reporting that authorities have set up a coronavirus diagnosis drive-through.

The New Zealand government’s economic response to coronavirus has been criticised as “startlingly flat-footed” and a symptom of “complacency”.

On Tuesday, the New Zealand stock market dropped 4.85% in the first half hour of trading, prompting opposition leader Simon Bridges to claim the Labour government wasn’t doing enough to stimulate the economy and look after the tourism, education and export industries.

Students at an elementary school in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung have found their own unique way to fight the coronavirus and stay ahead of the curve in epidemic prevention: an automated disinfectant dispenser built from Lego.

Children ranging from six to 12 years old use every school break and any chance they can get to line up to use their self-built alcohol disinfectant robot that some of their peers have assembled under the guidance of their robotics coach, Reuters reports.

“Washing hands is super,” shouts a recorded voice after the dispenser senses a pair of hands in front of its ultrasonic sensor and dispenses alcohol disinfectant from a spray bottle by pulling back its handle with a motor and gearwheel mechanism.

In the US, the death toll in Washington State has climbed to 22. The three new deaths were all among former residents of the Life Care Center Kirkland nursing home.

Panama has reported its first case of coronavirus, according to its health ministry.

South Korea reported 35 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, bringing the country’s total infections to 7,513, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The data came a day after South Korea showed the rate of increase in new infections fell to its lowest level in 11 days.

Australia’s Socceroos’ bid to reach the World Cup has been put on hold after Fifa and the AFC agreed to postpone Asian qualifying matches in March and June due to the coronavirus outbreak.

China’s matches against Maldives at home and Guam away have already been moved to Thailand and were set to be played in an empty stadium, but more than two dozen other matches were scheduled around the continent on two match days: March 26 and 31.

A further 32 games were scheduled to be played during the second international break on two match days on 4 and 9 June.

Here’s the wrap on US news today:

Warning that the number of coronavirus cases in the United States was expected to grow, the Trump administration on Monday said that testing for the virus would ramp up quickly in the coming weeks while declining to estimate how many Americans had already been tested for the virus.

The evening news conference at the White House came as the stock market plunged and an increasing number of Americans wondered how the official count of virus cases in the country, still in the mid-three-figures, could remain so low despite the aggressive spread of coronavirus elsewhere.

“There will be more cases,” the vice-president, Mike Pence, said. “But we simply ask today for the American people to engage in the common sense practices.”

Donald Trump appeared briefly at the start of the news conference to announce that the administration was considering a relief package for American workers harmed by the outbreak. Trump did not repeat claims he has made on Twitter that political opponents were exaggerating the health risks posed by the virus to antagonize him.

“This blindsided the world, and I think we’ve handled it very, very well, they’ve done a great job,” Trump said of the virus.

Over 500 cases of coronavirus have been diagnosed in 35 states and the District of Columbia, not counting cases stemming from repatriation or contained on a cruise ship that docked in California, Trump administration officials said. But the number of actual cases could be much higher, owing to a lag in testing in the US.

In the US, Reuters reports that at least 31 patients at the Seattle suburbs nursing home at the centre of the US outbreak have tested positive for coronavirus, according to a spokesman for the home. We’ll have more on this soon.

Staying with market news for the moment:

Australia’s stockmarket is extremely volatile today, with the benchmark ASX200 index opening sharply down before soaring back up to where it started the day following Monday’s savage sell-off.

The index is bouncing around in a band between about 1% above yesterday’s closing price and about 1% below it.

The whiplashing share prices have driven the market’s measure of volatility, the A-VIX, up more than 5% this morning.

All this turbulence means we will be waiting until later in the day to get a full sense of what’s happening in the market.

Asian markets have reacted positively to Donald Trump’s announcement

The US president on Monday proposed measures including working with hourly wage earners to ensure they can take time off and creating loans for small businesses so they can weather the coronavirus outbreak.

Markets rallied in Asia on the back of the announcement and S&P 500 futures are also up, signalling that the US markets will open up on Tuesday.

But it’s very volatile and it’s not certain that the rally will hold.

The Nikkei is down 2.75% in Tokyo.

In the US, passengers are expected to start disembarking the Grand Princess cruise ship, which has 21 confirmed cases of coronavirus, mostly among crew members, on board.

The cruise ship was forced to idle for days off the coast of California because of the cluster cases. It arrived in port on Monday as state and US officials prepared to transfer its thousands of passengers to military bases for quarantine or return them to their home countries.

When the ship pulled into the Port of Oakland near San Francisco with more than 3,500 people aboard, passengers lining the balconies waved and some left the cabins where they had been in isolation to go onto deck as the ship entered the port near San Francisco, AP reports.

Workers wearing gloves and yellow protective gear have placed a large tent by a platform where passengers will disembark. At least 20 buses and five ambulances are parked nearby, and officials have said those needing acute medical care for any reason will get off first.

We’ll have more updates shortly.

On the lockdown in Italy, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus voiced hope that drastic measures taken there could help rein in the virus, and would give less-affected countries more time to prepare for a wider spread.

But he acknowledged that “the disease has not run its course”.

“Right now I think we are still very much in the beginning or middle... of this fight,” he said, warning against complacency towards the virus.

As for the word pandemic, “I am not worried about the word, I am more worried about what the world’s reaction to the word will be,” Tedros told reporters.

He also slammed those who might suggest simply letting the virus run its course, pointing out that for the elderly and weak especially “it is very fatal.”

“If anything is going to hurt the world it is a moral decay, and not taking the deaths of the elderly or senior citizens” seriously, he said.

“Pandemic doesn’t mean that we say it is fine to live with it... we can contain it,” he said.

“No white flag. We don’t give up.”

“Pandemic” is not an official WHO term, and it does not trigger any specific actions. WHO has already put out its highest level of alert - saying the world is at “high risk”