China has ordered families of coronavirus victims to cremate their relatives at low-key funerals to stop the further spread of the virus.

Beijing's civil affairs ministry says funerals should be held in a 'simple and expeditious manner to avoid gatherings of people'.

The country's National Health Commission said bodies should be 'cremated close by and immediately', state-run media said.

The bodies must not be buried or moved away from the area where the person died, authorities say.

Funeral workers in protective suits take the body of a suspected coronavirus victim out of a building in the quarantined city of Wuhan on Saturday

More than 360 people have already died in the coronavirus outbreak, all but one of them in mainland China.

The figure is now higher than the number who died in mainland China during the 2002-03 SARS crisis.

However, there have also been claims that hasty cremations are minimising the death toll - meaning the true scale of the outbreak could be worse.

The civil affairs ministry said that staff handling funerals should wear protective gear and carry out temperature checks to avoid risking infection.

The ministry has also urged couples to delay their weddings in order to prevent large gatherings.

Yesterday, February 2, had been a popular day for wedding bookings because of the palindromic date - 02/02/2020.

Officials in Hubei province announced on Saturday that they would suspend all marriage registrations until further notice from today.

China has introduced drastic travel restrictions and pushed back the end of the Lunar New Year break - when hundreds of millions of people travel across the country to visit their families - in a bid to contain the virus.

The holiday - originally scheduled to end last Friday - was extended by three days to give authorities more time to deal with the crisis.

But some major cities including Shanghai have extended the holiday again, and many schools and universities delayed the start of new terms.

Funeral workers in protective suits disinfect themselves after handling the body of a coronavirus victim in Wuhan yesterday

Officials have also urged factories to delay their return to work and the public has been asked to avoid large crowds.

More than 50 million people in Hubei province, where the virus was first detected, are effectively locked down after authorities severed transport links.

A growing list of foreign countries and airlines have also halted or reduced travel links with China.

The US, Australia, New Zealand and Israel have banned foreign nationals from visiting if they have been in China recently, and they have also warned their own citizens against travelling there.

Russia has halted most of its air and rail traffic with China, shut down its land border with China and Mongolia and temporarily stopped issuing work visas to Chinese citizens.

Authorities said today that Russia was suspending the last operating train that connects Moscow and Beijing.