A woman quarantined in Italy posting a grave warning about the severity of the coronavirus has gone viral amidst the escalating pandemic.

Cristina Higgins, an American woman living in Italy with her husband and three children, has been on lock down in Bergamo for nearly two weeks according to NBC News.

She used Facebook to share her experience of life “at the heart of the coronavirus crisis” and the post has gone viral.

In the post she urges people to make lifestyle changes to help prevent the spread of the virus.

“I am writing this post because each of you, today, not the government, not the school district, not the mayor, each individual citizen has the chance, today to take actions that will deter the Italian situation from becoming your own country’s reality,” she wrote.

“The only way to stop this virus is to limit contagion. And the only way to limit contagion is for millions of people to change their behaviour today.”

Everyone in Bergamo is under government-ordered home isolation whether or not they are ill as Italy is in complete lockdown over Covid-19, with the country having recorded the second most cases of the virus worldwide next to China, where the outbreak started.

“We have friends who are getting sick. It's very stressful,” Higgins told NBC News.

“I am nauseous all day long, because every time I look at the news or talk to somebody else, something terrible has happened. And I don't know what's going to happen next.”

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The status has over 1.1 million shares on Facebook and over 141,000 comments after Ms Higgins urged people to share the message at the bottom of the post.

She also claimed that more younger patients were being submitted to hospitals for treatment amidst the epidemic, and cautioned younger people not to disregard the severity of the disease.

“For those who say that this is just something that happens to old people, starting yesterday the hospitals are reporting that younger and younger patients – 40, 45, 18, are coming in for treatment,” she said.

A health official in Bergamo has echoed these fears, warning that patients being admitted to hospital for treatment are getting younger.

“The type of patient is changing,” Luca Lorini, the head of anaesthesia and intensive care at a northern Italian hospital, told radio programme RaiNews24.

“They are a bit younger, between 40 to 45 years old and the cases are more complicated,” she said.

More than 1,800 people who tested positive for coronavirus have died in Italy, with the number of recorded cases surpassing 24,000.

Ms Higgins desperately tried to warn people to take the virus seriously to try and prevent the same crisis occurring in other countries.