UPDATE 1-France reports second coronavirus death, Italian link in another case

A second person suffering from the coronavirus has died in France and a Frenchman who had travelled to Italy's Lombardy region had also tested positive, the country's health authorities said on Wednesday.

Jerome Salomon said the death was one of three new cases in France this week, bringing the total confirmed cases in the country to 17. A 60-year-old French national was hospitalised in Paris in a serious condition and tested for the virus late on Tuesday. "Unfortunately (he) died during the night", Salomon said.

France is on high alert after neighbouring Italy became a new front in the global fight to contain the coronavirus outbreak, which the head of the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention called a rapidly escalating epidemic in multiple locations. Coronavirus cases in people who travelled recently to northern Italy have now been found in France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Romania, Croatia and Algeria.

The Frenchman who travelled to Lombardy was hospitalised in Strasbourg and was not in a serious condition, Salomon said. The third new case involved a 55-year-old now on life support in the city of Amiens, in northern France.