eu Outbreak spreads in Europe from Italy Several European countries have announced their first coronavirus cases, all apparently linked to the growing outbreak in Italy. Austria, Croatia, Greece and Switzerland said the cases involved people who had been to Italy, as did Algeria in Africa. The first positive virus test has been recorded in Latin America - a Brazilian resident just returned from Italy. Italy has in recent days become Europe's worst-affected country. Authorities have confirmed more than 300 cases and 12 deaths there, the most recent a 70-year-old resident of Lombardy who died after being taken to intensive care in Parma. The country has also seen four children infected. de Germany: The Beginning of a Possible Coronavirus Epidemic There was no pandemic yet, Spahn said, but the situation had unfortunately worsened in the past few hours. Germany declared that it was heading towards a coronavirus epidemic and could no longer trace all cases, when the number of infected patients inside China has, for the first time, been overtaken by those elsewhere. According to the daily The Berlin Spectator, what the authorities feared might be happening: precisely two weeks after the last Coronavirus case was confirmed in the Bavarian nation, the 16th one, seven more patients are being treated now. German Health Minister Jens Spahn stated that the country stood "at the beginning of a Coronavirus epidemic." He said he had ordered the health authorities of the sixteen federal states to activate their pandemic plans and "to prepare a possible implementation." There was no pandemic yet, Spahn said, but the situation had unfortunately worsened "in the past few hours," he lamented. "The infection chains are partially no longer trackable, and that is a new thing," Spahn said.

global Coronavirus spreads faster outside China, stoking global fears The number of new coronavirus infections inside China - the source of the outbreak - was for the first time overtaken by fresh cases elsewhere yesterday, with Italy and Iran emerging as epicentres of the rapidly spreading illness. Asia reported hundreds of new cases, Brazil confirmed Latin America’s first infection and the new disease - Covid-19 - was also detected for the first time in Pakistan, Sweden, Norway, Greece, Romania and Algeria. US health authorities, managing 59 cases so far - mostly Americans repatriated from a cruise ship in Japan - have said a global pandemic is likely. US President Donald Trump, seeking to calm markets and increasingly worried public, said in a live broadcast that the United States was “very very ready” to face the virus threat and that Vice President Mike Pence would be in charge of the national response. It was one of just a handful of times that the president has appeared in the White House briefing room. Stock markets across the world have lost US$3.3 trillion of value in four days of trading, as measured by the MSCI all-country index. Wall Street reversed earlier gains yesterday afternoon and oil prices dropped to their lowest level in over a year, spooked in part by health officials saying dozens of people who had been in China were being monitored in suburbs of populous New York city - although no confirmed cases have been found. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio urged the federal government to tighten testing for visitors from a range of countries where the virus has been spreading, adding that its eventual detection in the city was “100 percent certain.” The virus that can lead to pneumonia is believed to have originated in a market selling wildlife in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year. It has infected about 80,000 people and killed more than 2,700, the vast majority in China.