Italian couple from Lombardy are Austria's first coronavirus cases

Austria reported its first two confirmed cases of the coronavirus on Tuesday - two Italians who recently arrived from northern Italy, Europe's worst-hit region.

The couple, both aged 24 from a town near Bergamo in Lombardy, drove on Friday to the mountainous Austrian province of Tyrol, which borders Italy, a doctor treating them said.

"They are both very cooperative and in a good overall condition," the doctor, Guenter Weiss, told a news conference.

Both patients, a man and a woman, no longer had fever and currently had "few symptoms," he said.

Italy has become a frontline in the global outbreak of the virus, with 280 cases and seven deaths, most in Lombardy and neighbouring Veneto. The number of cases there has ballooned from just three on Friday, and authorities have rushed to seal off the worst affected towns.

But the virus has continued to spread and Italian authorities on Tuesday reported an infection in Sicily, the first case south of Rome - a tourist also from Bergamo.

Austria has had more than 200 suspected cases so far but all had tested negative, and the government has been watching developments across the border with concern.

On Sunday night Austria shut down rail travel between Germany and Italy by denying entry to a train from Venice because of two suspected coronavirus cases among about 300 passengers. Only once those two passengers' tests came back negative was the train let through.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has said Austria will do that again if people suspected of carrying the virus arrive at the border.

Tyrol, wedged between Germany and Italy, is a vital transport corridor between those two countries. It is home to by far the busiest transport route connecting them, the Brenner Pass. More than half the freight crossing the Alps passes through Austria.

"There is still no cause for panic or concern. I think we are handling these two cases very professionally," Tyrol's provincial health minister, Bernhard Tilg, told the news conference.

Who the couple - a woman working in Tyrol and her boyfriend who was visiting her - had been in contact with is being checked.

"We are now in the so-called containment phase - that means we are trying to end the infection chain here," the head of Tyrol's public health body, Franz Katzgraber, said.

The new coronavirus has killed more than 2,600 people, most in China, and spread to 29 other countries, according to a Reuters tally. The number of confirmed cases globally has risen above 80,000. 

Reuters