KUWAIT: Mongolia's President Battulga Khaltmaa and other government officials have submitted to a 14-day quarantine after returning home from their visit to China, the state news agency Montsame reported on Friday.

Battulga is the first head of state to visit China since the country began implementing special measure to curb the coronavirus outbreak in January.

He arrived in Beijing with Foreign Minister Tsogtbaatar Damdin and other senior government officials on Thursday, and held a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.

They were taken into quarantine as soon as they arrived in Mongolia as a precautionary measure, Montsame said.

Churches in Kuwait will stay closed in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. They will remain closed for two weeks.

The rapid spread of the coronavirus increased fears of a pandemic on Friday, with six countries reporting their first cases and the World Health Organization (WHO) raising its global spread and impact risk alert to “very high”.

World shares fell again, winding up their worst week since the 2008 global financial crisis and bringing the global wipeout to $6 trillion.

Hopes that the epidemic that started in China late last year would be over in months, and that economic activity would quickly return to normal, have been shattered.

According to the latest reports, more than 83,000 cases of the COVID-19 disease have now been confirmed in more than 50 countries.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said his organization was not underestimating the risk.

“That is why we said today the global risk is very high,” he told reporters in Geneva. “We increased it from ‘high’ to ‘very high’.”