Praised by the World Health Organisation for its efforts to prevent the coronavirus from spreading, Singapore has warned that deaths in the city-state would become "inevitable" as a global pandemic emerges.

The country's health minister Gan Kim Yong has said that "it is inevitable that at some point in time we will see fatalities from COVID-19 as we have seen all around the world," Reuters reports.

Lawrence Wong, who co-heads Singapore’s virus-fighting taskforce also said that the new coronavirus is starting to look like a "global pandemic". "It’s not going to be possible to shut ourselves out," he added.

Read more here.