The US death toll from coronavirus climbed to 11 on Wednesday and a major county in Washington state asked workers to stay at home, closed some schools and warned high risk groups like the elderly or seriously ill to stay indoors.

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Officials in King county, which includes Seattle and is one of the centers of the outbreak, urged businesses to allow employees to work remotely if possible, and said it will allow telecommuting for some of its state workers for the next three weeks.

They recommended that vulnerable groups such as the over 60s, pregnant women and people with serious underlying health conditions stay at home and away from large social gatherings.

One school district in the area, Northshore, which serves 22,000 students across King and Snohomish counties, announced late Wednesday that it was closing all 36 of its schools.

California also reported its first fatality and declared a state of emergency over the virus.

The death in California was of an elderly man with underlying health issues, who tested positive for the virus on Tuesday and was probably exposed while traveling on a Princess cruise ship that departed from San Francisco to Mexico in February, public health officials said. It was the first death from the outbreak in the US outside of Washington state.

The man lived in Placer county, an area north-east of Sacramento, near Tahoe national forest, and was kept in isolation at Kaiser Permanente Roseville. It was the second confirmed case of coronavirus in the county.

California governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency over the virus on Wednesday. In a statement, Newsom said he extended “deepest condolences” to those affected by the death in Placer county and that “California is working around the clock to keep our communities safe, healthy and informed”.

The new death comes as US officials, schools and businesses face increasing pressure to contain the spread of virus. In Washington DC, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed an $8.3bn bill to help fund containment efforts.

The 415-2 vote came after House speaker Nancy Pelosi beat a tactical retreat on vaccine price guarantees and followed a debate that lasted only a few minutes.

The Senate is expected to act quickly so that Donald Trump can sign the bill into law, putting funds into the pipeline to fight the virus. The administration is also working to allow laboratories to develop their own coronavirus tests without seeking regulatory approval first, the US health secretary, Alex Azar, said.

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In California, public health officials said the adult who died arrived at the hospital by ambulance on 27 February and had had minimal community exposure since returning from the cruise on 21 February. The 10 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers and five emergency responders who were exposed before this person was put in isolation are now in quarantine, but they are not exhibiting symptoms. County officials and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working to identify and contact other cruise passengers.

California is tackling the virus on multiple fronts, with infections reported across the state, including seven in Los Angeles county and 11 in Santa Clara county, the heart of Silicon Valley. One case was reported in Berkeley on Tuesday.

In Los Angeles, officials declared a local emergency and a public health emergency in response to the threat, with three new confirmed travel-related cases of people who had been to northern Italy, one of the places hardest hit in the global outbreak of the virus.

As of Wednesday, there have been 53 positive cases of coronavirus in California – 24 from repatriation flights, 12 that are travel-related, seven from person-to-person family contact exposure, three from person-to-person healthcare facility exposure, four community acquired and three from an unknown source. About 515 people have been tested.

Elsewhere in the US, three family members and a neighbor of a New York man infected with the new coronavirus have also tested positive, officials said on Wednesday.

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New York’s Yeshiva University said one of its students had tested positive for Covid-19, and it was canceling all classes on Wednesday at one of its four New York City campuses as a “precautionary step”.

The four new cases include three family members of the man, who is hospitalized, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio said in a statement. Health authorities said one of his children was a student at Yeshiva. The fourth was a neighbor of the infected family.

De Blasio on Thursday morning announced that the number of confirmed cases in New York state was now at 13.

He urged the CDC to increase the supply of test kits and expedite the approval of testing by private companies.

“Our single greatest challenge is the lack of fast federal action to increase testing capacity. Without that, we cannot beat this epidemic back,” he said.

The hospitalized patient had not traveled to countries hardest hit in the coronavirus outbreak, which began in China in December and is now present in nearly 80 countries and territories, killing more than 3,000 people. The first New York case, reported last week, was in a woman who had returned from Iran, where at least 77 people have died.

Cuomo said about 300 students from New York’s college systems, SUNY and CUNY, were being recalled from five countries – China, Italy, Japan, Iran and South Korea – and would be flown on a chartered plane and then be quarantined for 14 days.

The latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) listed 129 confirmed and presumed cases in the United States, up from the previous 108.

North Carolina became the 13th state to report a case on Tuesday. The person had visited the nursing home in the Seattle area of Washington state where nine out of 27 cases reported as of Tuesday were connected to the long-term facility for the elderly.

The Seattle area has the largest concentration of coronavirus cases detected to date in the US.