At the foot of the skyscrapers in Madrid's business district, the streets are empty as the city silently marks day 10 of lockdown to halt the spread of the coronavirus. 

The coronavirus has killed another 240 people in France, the top French health official said on Tuesday, bringing the death toll in the country from the pandemic to 1,100.

Jerome Salomon told reporters that 22,300 people had been registered as testing positive for the virus in France, with a total of 10,176 hospitalized of whom 2,516 people are in intensive care. 

More than 1,600 people have been arrested in Jordan in three days for violating a curfew aimed at stemming the spread of coronavirus, a security official said Tuesday.

The source said the 1,657 people arrested across Jordan since the curfew came into effect on Saturday had been placed in quarantine centers run by the army.

Italy on Tuesday received more reassuring evidence that its coronavirus infection rate was slowing thanks to a painful lockdown that other nations are starting to apply at great economic cost.

U.S. President Donald Trump insisted Tuesday that he wants the coronavirus lockdown relaxed in the United States by mid-April, warning that keeping the measures in place could "destroy" the country.

"A lot of people agree with me. Our country -- it's not built to shut down," he said on Fox News. "You can destroy a country this way by closing it down."

Morocco has authorized hospitals to use antimalarial drugs in treating the new coronavirus, according to a document seen by AFP, as scientists urge caution over encouraging results from small trials.

Six hundred people have died from the new coronavirus in the United States, while the number of confirmed cases now stands at 49,768, a tracker maintained by Johns Hopkins University showed Tuesday.

Either on television as in Libya or on tablets in the IT-savvy Gulf monarchies, in the time of novel coronavirus millions of schoolchildren around the Arab world are now learning lessons at home.

Governments across the region have shuttered schools forcing pupils to stay away in a bid to combat the virus, but at the risk of deepening an already worrying educational divide.

The United Nations top envoy for Syria on Tuesday called for a nationwide ceasefire to allow for a better response to the threat of the novel coronavirus.

Russian authorities do not know the full extent of the coronavirus outbreak across the country and should step up measures to stem the pandemic, a top official said Tuesday.