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Yemen's Saudi-backed government on Thursday reported the first cases of novel coronavirus in the southern province of Al Dhalea, underlining fears that the infection had found a foothold in the war-torn country.

The Trump administration is seeking to add 300 million N95 masks, the respiratory protective devices that are key to protecting medical workers fighting the deadly coronavirus, to the U.S. stockpile by the fall, a senior administration official said on Thursday.

A mental illness crisis is looming as millions of people worldwide are surrounded by death and disease and forced into isolation, poverty and anxiety by the pandemic of COVID-19, United Nations health experts said on Thursday.

Residents in Wuhan braved pouring rain in queues of more than an hour to take part in a government-led exercise to test the city's 11 million people for the novel coronavirus, a scale health experts describe as unprecedented.

A Russian company trialling a drug to treat the new coronavirus said on Thursday it was testing it on infected patients in what it called second- and third-phase clinical trials based on World Health Organisation (WHO) criteria.

Amazon Inc 's video game live-streaming platform Twitch is forming an advisory council of experienced users, online safety experts and anti-bullying advocates to help improve safety on the site, Twitch said in a blog post on Thursday.

Deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy climbed by 262 on Thursday, against 195 the day before, the Civil Protection Agency said, while the daily tally of new cases rose to 992 from 888 on Wednesday.

China's foreign ministry, asked about China-linked hackers breaking into U.S. COVID-19 research, said China opposed what it called slander from the United States.

France will tax big digital businesses this year whether there is progress or not towards an international deal on a levy, its finance minister said on Thursday, adding such a tax had never been more legitimate or more necessary.

Technologists and health officials around the world are racing to develop smartphone apps to trace who has been in contact with carriers of the novel coronavirus.

Italy will start testing a representative sample of 150,000 people in 2,000 cities next week to understand the extent of its COVID-19 epidemic, the head of the government's scientific committee told parliament on Thursday.

The science of sewage surveillance could be deployed in countries across the world to help monitor the spread of national epidemics of COVID-19 while reducing the need for mass testing, scientists say.

France on Thursday said equal access to any coronavirus vaccine developed by Sanofi was non-negotiable and that no country such as the United States should have priority because of financial motivations.

A vaccine to counter the new coronavirus could be approved in about a year in an "optimistic" scenario, a agency which approves medicines for the European Union said on Thursday.

Yemen's Saudi-backed government on Thursday reported the first cases of the novel coronavirus in the southern province of Al Dhalea, among 15 new infections that took the total in areas under its control to 85 with 12 deaths.

Two health advocacy groups have written to the Indian government asking it to rescind patents given to Gilead Sciences for the drug remdesivir so it can be distributed more fairly to coronavirus patients around the world, particularly in poorer nations.

France will go ahead with its tax on big digital businesses this year whether there is progress or not towards an international deal on the issue, its finance minister said on Thursday.

Germany's unlisted CureVac said its experimental coronavirus vaccine was shown to trigger an immune response in animals when given a low dose and the biotech firm was looking at carrying out its first human trials in June.

Moscow will begin free mass testing of citizens for the coronavirus from May 15, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on his website on Thursday, with a target of 100,000 people a day by the end of the month.

Around 148,000 people in England had COVID-19 in recent weeks, according to results on Thursday from a large-scale study in Britain into the spread of the disease.