An elderly woman in hospital for cancer who tested positive for the new coronavirus has died, health officials in Italy said on Sunday. "She had been hospitalised for a few days," said Giulio Gallera, the health chief of the northern Lombardy region, the centre of a coronavirus outbreak.

"She'd been tested and they already knew she had the coronavirus." If coronavirus is determined to be the cause of death, the woman will be the third person in Italy to have died from the so-called COVID-19 epidemic.