The rate of infection also slowed, with 4,576 new cases over the past 24 hours, while the number of people who recovered from the virus rose to 55,688.

Although health chiefs say the pandemic has peaked, they have urged the population to pay strict attention to the ongoing national lockdown which was put in place on March 14 in order to slow the spread of the virus.

The restrictions will remain in place until April 25 although the government has made clear it expects to announce another two-week extension.

Here are more developments:

Recovered patients test positive again in South Korea

South Korean officials on Friday reported 91 patients thought cleared of the new coronavirus had tested positive again.

Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), told a briefing that the virus may have been “reactivated” rather than the patients being re-infected.

South Korean health officials said it remains unclear what is behind the trend, with epidemiological investigations still under way.

Nearly 7,000 South Koreans have been reported as recovered from the illness.

“The number will only increase, 91 is just the beginning now,” said Kim Woo-joo, professor of infectious diseases at Korea University Guro Hospital.

False test results could also be at fault, other experts said, or remnants of the virus could still be in patients’ systems but not be infectious or of danger to the host or others.

South Korea’s Daegu struggles to banish coronavirus stigma

South Korea on Friday reported 27 new cases, its lowest after daily cases peaked at more than 900 in late February, according to KCDC, adding the total stood at 10,450 cases.

The death toll rose by seven to 211, it said.

The city of Daegu, which endured the first large coronavirus outbreak outside of China, reported zero new cases for the first time since late February. With at least 6,807 confirmed cases, Daegu accounts for more than half of all South Korea’s total infections.

Indonesian crew member from Zaandam cruise ship dies

A crew member of the virus-hit Zaandam cruise ship who was hospitalised after the vessel was allowed to dock in Florida has died, local officials said, raising the ship’s Covid-19 death toll to four.

Broward County Medical Examiner Craig Mallak said Indonesian national Wiwit Widarto, 50, who had tested positive for the virus, died on Wednesday.

The man’s death came six days after the Zaandam and a sister ship docked in the Fort Lauderdale port after spending two weeks at sea rejected by South American ports, said a Holland America Line spokesman. He had been taken to a Florida hospital the same day the ship docked.

Four elderly passengers had already died before the cruise ships arrived, and the medical examiner said earlier this week that three of those people tested positive for Covid-19. The fourth person’s death was caused by a viral infection. Mallak said the man tested negative for the new virus but he had been dead for 12 days before he was examined.

After deaths on virus-hit cruise ship Zaandam, guests clamour to leave

Meanwhile, 13 passengers on the Coral Princess cruise ship docked in Florida will remain on board for another 14 days, Princess Cruises said in a statement.

Travel restrictions are preventing the passengers from getting charter flights home, and local authorities will not allow them to stay in hotels, the firm said.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment about how many people still on board have Covid-19 symptoms. At least seven passengers and five crew tested positive for the coronavirus before the ship docked at PortMiami last Saturday. Two had died.

Australia gets tough as Easter travel ban looms

Australia will deploy helicopters, set up police checkpoints and hand out hefty fines to deter people from breaking an Easter travel ban, officials warned on Friday, in their toughest crackdown against the coronavirus, even as its spread slows.

More than half of Australians identify as Christian, with many in past years attending church services or going on trips to visit family and friends during Easter public holidays that run until Monday.

But with places of worship closed, bans on public gatherings larger than two and non-essential travel limited to combat the spread of the virus, Australians were told to stay home this year or face dire consequences.

“Police will take action,” New South Wales Police Deputy Commissioner Gary Worboys told reporters, adding that police had issued almost 50 new fines for breaches of public health orders in the previous 24 hours.

Asean ministers endorse plans for pandemic fund

Southeast Asian foreign ministers have endorsed the setting up of a regional fund to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and discussed a planned video summit of their leaders with counterparts from China, Japan and South Korea.

The Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila said on Friday that the top diplomats of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) linked up by video on Thursday in a meeting led by Vietnam.

The ministers endorsed several collective steps to fight the pandemic, including the establishment of a Covid-19 Asean response fund, the sharing of information and strategies and ways to ease the impact of the global health crisis on people and the economy, the department said in a statement. It did not provide details.

They also discussed the planned meeting of their leaders with counterparts from China, Japan and South Korea in a video conference on April 14 to talk about the pandemic.

In Thursday’s discussion, Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr stressed the importance of maintaining peace and stability in the South China Sea amid the contagion, the department said.

The Philippines has expressed solidarity with Hanoi after a Vietnamese fishing boat was reportedly rammed and sank by a Chinese coast guard ship in disputed waters near the Paracel islands in the South China Sea.

Lockdowns extended in Malaysia, Kazakhstan

The curbs, imposed on March 18, were originally set to end on April 14. But the government reported 118 new cases on Friday, bringing its total to more than 4,200.

“It may take a few months before we can say we are free of the virus,” Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said in a televised address.

Also on Friday, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s office said Kazakhstan will extend a state of emergency declared over the coronavirus outbreak until the end of April, but will allow some businesses to reopen after a two-week shutdown.

The state of emergency, which has allowed the government to lock down all provinces and major cities and shut down many businesses in the capital, Nur-Sultan, and biggest city, Almaty, was originally due to end on April 15.

Tokayev instructed municipal authorities to selectively allow some small businesses to reopen in major cities provided they can meet strict safety requirements.

In Europe, Italy is leaning toward extending the country’s lockdown to early May, newspapers La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera reported.

The country is suffering from the world’s worst Covid-19 outbreak, with 18,279 fatalities as of Thursday and a total of 143,626 confirmed infections. There will be some small relaxations starting on Tuesday, the newspapers reported, with bookshops and stationers expected to be allowed to reopen.

Philippines bars doctors from going abroad

The Philippines has barred doctors, nurses and other health workers from leaving for overseas work as the nation seeks to stem the coronavirus outbreak, according to its immigration bureau.

The temporary halt follows an order of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration on April 2, immigration spokeswoman Dana Sandoval said. It will last for the duration of the nation’s state of emergency, according to the employment administration order.

The Philippines, which sends thousands of medical practitioners to work overseas, must now reinforce a health care system overwhelmed by the pandemic and weakened by deaths and infection of more than 200 health workers.

The ban covers 12 other jobs, including medical equipment operation and repair. More than 30,000 doctors, nurses, medical technicians, caregivers left the Philippines in 2010, according to latest available data.

The Philippines had 4,195 coronavirus cases as of Friday, with deaths reaching 221, including at least a dozen health workers.

WHO denies ignoring Taiwan warning

The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Friday denied having brushed off a Taiwanese warning on human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus soon after its outbreak in China late last year.

The US has accused the body of “putting politics first” by ignoring Taiwan’s warning in late December, and thus helping Beijing conceal the pandemic’s gravity.

President Donald Trump has threatened to withhold funding for the WHO, which is at the forefront of fighting the pandemic that has infected more than 1.5 million people worldwide.

The US said on Thursday it was “deeply disturbed that Taiwan’s information was withheld from the global health community, as reflected in the WHO’s January 14 statement that there was no indication of human-to-human transmission”.

The WHO said it received an email on December 31 from Taiwanese authorities, which mentioned “press reports of cases of atypical pneumonia in Wuhan and that Wuhan authorities believed it was not Sars”, which killed 774 people in 2002 and 2003.

“There was no mention in this mail of human-to-human transmission,” the WHO maintained.

The UN body said it had asked Taiwanese authorities to show how it “communicated to us” their suspicions about transmission, insisting “we are only aware of this single email which makes no mention of transmission between humans”.

“But we have not received a response,” the WHO said.

EU ministers agree on US$590 billion rescue package

In an emergency teleconference on Thursday, they approved a plan to stave off what is expected to be a recession of unprecedented size. The cornerstone of the proposal will be to employ the European Stability Mechanism, the euro area’s bailout fund, to offer credit lines worth as much as €240 billion.

While important, the agreement by the finance ministers is only one step toward the adoption of such a package; the bloc’s leaders will have to debate, fine-tune and eventually endorse the plan. That meeting could happen as soon as next week.

Boris Johnson out of intensive care

“The prime minister is back on a ward and continuing his recovery which is at an early stage. He continues to be in very good spirits,” the spokesman told reporters.

“I was told he was waving his thanks to all of the nurses and doctors that he saw as he was moved from the intensive care unit back to the ward. The hospital said that he was in extremely good spirits last night.”

UK scientists knew virus explosion was coming, but were slow to raise alarm

Johnson’s father said the prime minister needs time to recover from the illness and is unlikely to be back at work imminently.

Stanley Johnson said the leader needed to “rest up.”

“He has to take time,” Johnson told the BBC. “I cannot believe you can walk away from this and get straight back to Downing Street and pick up the reins without a period of readjustment.”

Intensive care specialist Duncan Young said it is “almost impossible to know” how long it will take Johnson to get back to full health.

“He has been very ill and it will take a while,” Young said. “Nobody knows in terms of shortness of breath and lethargy, in scientific literature, how long it takes to recover. It particularly depends on how ill you have been.”

Yanomami indigenous youth dies in Brazil

A Yanomami youth has died after testing positive for coronavirus, health officials said on Friday, raising fears that the epidemic will spread among the largest indigenous tribe in northern Brazil.

Alvanei Xirixan, 15, died on Thursday night in intensive care in the main hospital of Boa Vista, capital of Roraima state, according to the local indigenous health service Dsei attached to the Ministry of Health.

Anthropologists and health experts warn that coronavirus could have a devastating impact on Brazil’s 850,000 indigenous people who are vulnerable to external diseases and whose lifestyle in tribal villages rules out social distancing.

More than 26,000 Yanomami live on Brazil’s border with Venezuela on a reservation the size of Portugal. Their lands have been invaded for years by thousands of illegal gold miners who brought measles and other illnesses fatal to the tribe.

Xirixan was from the village of Rehebe on the Uraricoera river, an access route for the gold rush miners, and had been in hospital for a week, Dsei said on social media.

The Yanomami youth was the third indigenous person to die in the epidemic now sweeping Brazil with force. Two previous deaths were of indigenous people who were living in urban areas, including an 87-year-ol woman in Para state and man in Manaus.

Four members of the Kokama tribe on the upper reaches of the Amazon River close to Colombia and Peru have been infected after a doctor who worked with them tested positive for coronavirus.

Germany criticises US outbreak response as too slow

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has criticised the United States’ handling of the coronavirus outbreak as too slow, the latest sign of tensions between the two allies as they respond to the crisis.

China took “very authoritarian measures, while in the US, the virus was played down for a long time,” Maas said in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine.

“These are two extremes, neither of which can be a model for Europe,” he said.

Germany was among countries that last week accused Washington of “Wild West” tactics in outbidding or blocking shipments to buyers who had already signed deals for vital medical supplies.

Maas told Der Spiegel that he hoped the US would rethink its international relationships in light of the coronavirus crisis.

“Let’s see to what extent the actions of the American government will lead to discussions in the US about whether the ‘America First’ model really works,” he said, adding that aggressive trade policies may have hurt the country’s ability to procure protective equipment.

Agence France-Presse, Reuters, dpa, Associated Press, Kyodo, TNA and Bloomberg