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France said on Wednesday it would extend a lockdown aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus as the death toll soared across Europe.

Governments are grappling with how to balance public safety against the devastating economic impact of stay-at-home orders that have erased millions of jobs in a matter of weeks.

More than 80 000 people worldwide have died in the virus crisis, which has sent the global economy spiralling and forced billions of people to remain at home as much as possible.

As the economic downturn starts to bite, health experts stressed that any premature loosening of restrictions could accelerate the spread of a contagion that has already infiltrated nearly every country.

In France, one of the hardest-hit nations in Europe with more than 10 000 deaths, President Emmanuel Macron will address the nation next week to explain the path forward.

The confinement order issued on 17 March "will be extended" beyond the current deadline of 15 April, an official close to Macron told AFP.

Italy and Spain are still recording hundreds of deaths a day, and the situation is also deteriorating in Britain, which saw a record 938 fatalities on Wednesday as Prime Minister Boris Johnson spent a third day in intensive care.

- AFP

In New York, the epicentre of the US outbreak, the state's governor noted the new single-day high for virus deaths at 779, but offered an optimistic view for the weeks to come.

"We are flattening the curve," Andrew Cuomo told reporters, as he cited a decreasing hospitalisation rate due to stay-at-home orders.

That optimism was shared by US President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, who both said the data seemed to indicate a turn for the better.

"We are hopefully heading toward a final stretch, the light at the end of the tunnel," Trump told reporters.

Pence chimed in: "We're beginning to see glimmers of hope."

- AFP

There are now more than 1.5 million confirmed cases of coronavirus cross the world, with the United States and the United Kingdom suffering the highest number of deaths in a single day since the outbreak began.

Data collected by Johns Hopkins University shows that of the 1.5 million people with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, nearly 329 000 have recovered.

Across the world, more than 88 000 people have died with the US reporting 1 850 deaths on Wednesday, and the UK, 938.

Even as the number of deaths rises, an apparent slowdown in confirmed cases and hospital admissions has some governments considering ways to ease the lockdowns that have helped curb the spread of the disease.

- Al Jazeeera

Brazil said on Wednesday a first case of the new coronavirus had been detected among the Yanomami people, an Amazon indigenous group known for its remoteness and its vulnerability to foreign diseases.

"Today we confirmed a case (of the virus) among the Yanomami, which is very worrying," Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta told a news conference.

"We have to be triply cautious with (indigenous) communities, especially the ones that have very little contact with the outside world."

The Yanomami patient, a 15-year-old boy, is being treated in the intensive care unit at a hospital in Boa Vista, the capital of the northern state of Roraima, officials said.

Brazil has now confirmed at least seven coronavirus cases among the indigenous population, according to the newspaper Globo.

The first was a 20-year-old woman from the Kokama ethnic group who was confirmed positive a week ago.

Brazil is home to an estimated 800 000 indigenous people from more than 300 ethnic groups.

- AFP

Long maligned as job-stealers and aspiring overlords, robots are being increasingly relied on as fast, efficient, contagion-proof champions in the war against the deadly coronavirus.

One team of robots temporarily cared for patients in a makeshift hospital in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the Covid-19 outbreak began.

Meals were served, temperatures taken and communications handled by machines, one of them named "Cloud Ginger" by its maker CloudMinds, which has operations in Beijing and California.

"It provided useful information, conversational engagement, entertainment with dancing, and even led patients through stretching exercises," CloudMinds president Karl Zhao said of the humanoid robot.

"The smart field hospital was completely run by robots."

A small medical team remotely controlled the field hospital robots. Patients wore wristbands that gathered blood pressure and other vital data.

The smart clinic only handled patients for a few days, but it foreshadowed a future in which robots tend to patients with contagious diseases while health care workers manage from safe distances.

- AFP

Cases against scores of Rohingya Muslims detained after fleeing Myanmar's restive Rakhine state have been dropped, as fears grow of a potential coronavirus outbreak in the country's overcrowded prisons.

A military crackdown in 2017 forced some 750 000 Rohingya to escape to Bangladesh, where they languish in sprawling refugee cities.

Those who remain in Rakhine live under tight restrictions with little access to healthcare and education, unable to move freely in conditions Amnesty International has branded "apartheid".

For years many have taken to boats and buses to escape.

But in recent months hundreds have been caught and detained in prisons - charged with breaching immigration laws, offences which carry up to two years in jail.

On Wednesday a court suddenly dropped cases against two of the largest groups of arrested Rohingya, totalling 128 people.

"Charges against both adults and children are withdrawn and they are to be released," judge Khin Myat Myat Htun told Pathein court in Ayeyarwady Region.

An AFP reporter confirmed four buses carrying the Rohingya and bound for Yangon left Pathein prison early on Thursday morning.

- AFP