Top officials deemed responsible for the outbreaks have been fired, authorities said on Friday. A Chinese couple wear protective masks as they ride a scooter in Beijing on Thursday. Credit:Getty Images The coronavirus epidemic is set to be a major focus of discussion at a meeting on the weekend of finance leaders from the Group of 20 major economies, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said, amid rising risks to global growth. Japan and Singapore are on the brink of recession and South Korea on Friday said its exports to China slumped in the first 20 days of February as the outbreak upends global supply chains. The latest front in the widening global fight against COVID-19 emerged in Daegu, South Korea, where the city's 2.5 million residents were urged to stay inside, wearing masks even indoors to stem further infection.

South Korea reported 52 new confirmed cases of the coronavirus on Friday, taking the national total to 156 with the majority in Daegu. Commuters on the subway in Seoul, South Korea, wear masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Credit:Getty Images Most have been traced to an infected 61-year-old woman known as "Patient 31" who attended services at a branch of the Shincheonji Church in Daegu in recent weeks. As of Friday more than 400 members of the church are showing symptoms of the disease, though tests were still ongoing, Daegu Mayor Kwon Young-jin said at a briefing. Kwon made a nationally televised appeal for those preventative measures, warning that a rash of new cases could overwhelm the health system. He pleaded for help from the country's central government.

The flare-up came more than 1400 kilometres from COVID-19's epicentre across the Yellow Sea in China's Hubei province and its capital of Wuhan, a sign of the risks the virus potentially poses to communities across the region and beyond. "Everything that is not known about this is causing concern," said Dr David Heymann, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Though all but about 1000 of more than 75,000 reported cases of COVID-19 have been recorded in China, scattered cases have erupted elsewhere. Iran announced three more infections on Thursday, a day after the country's state-run news agency, IRNA, reported its first two deaths stemming from the virus.

In addition, South Korea reported its first fatality and Japan said two former passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship had died of the illness, bringing the death toll there to three. Loading Other deaths confirmed by the World Health Organisation outside mainland China include two in Hong Kong and one each in France, the Philippines and Taiwan. The trajectory of the outbreak remained clouded by China's zigzagging daily reports of new cases and shifting ways of tallying them. The number of new cases in China declined on Thursday, to 394, a notable shift from the 1749 figure released the previous day. Another 114 deaths in China were linked to the virus.

But those statistics came after yet another change in how cases are counted. Last week, China's National Health Commission said officials in Hubei would record new infections without waiting for laboratory test results, relying instead on doctors' diagnoses and lung imaging. On Thursday, though, it returned to its prior way of counting, a decision sure to aggravate observers who say consistency is key to understanding COVID-19's path. The health commission said it was reducing its count of infections by 279 after lab tests found they had wrongly been included in the tally. A Chinese security guard wears a protective mask as he stands at a barricade to control the entry and exit from a residential area in Beijing. Credit:Getty Images Cities in Hubei with a combined population of more than 60 million have been under lockdown since the Lunar New Year holiday.