Beijing: China's coronavirus caseload continued to wane Tuesday even as the epidemic took a firmer hold beyond Asia, with three countries now exceeding 1000 cases and the US reporting its sixth death.

China's health ministry announced just 125 new cases detected over the past 24 hours, China's lowest number since January 20. Another 31 deaths were reported, all of them in the hardest-hit province of Hubei. The figures bring China's total number of cases to 80,151 with 2,943 deaths.

The global shift in the epidemic was apparent with 2410 recovered patients being released from Hubei's hospitals and treatment centres, many of them hastily built over recent weeks to cope with the thousands of people sickened by the virus. But new infections outside China were far surpassing its totals.

Clusters of disease grew in South Korea, Italy and Iran, and the virus has turned up for the first time in New York, Moscow and Berlin, as well as Latvia, Indonesia, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Jordan and Portugal. The worldwide death toll topped 3000, and the number of cases tops 90,000 across about 70 countries.