Donald Trump has declared the coronavirus outbreak a national emergency as he considered imposing a ban on UK visitors to the US.
The US president said 50 billion dollars would be opened up for state and local governments to respond to the outbreak on Friday.
Speaking from the Rose Garden at the White House, Mr Trump said: "I am officially declaring a national emergency.
"We will defeat this threat. When America is tested America rises to the occasion."
Mr Trump announced earlier in the week that he would be imposing a travel ban on 26 European countries, excluding the UK.
But during Friday's speech, he said the UK could be added to the list due to the country's rising number of cases.
He said: "We are looking at it based on the new numbers that are coming out and we may have to include them in the list of countries that we will, you could say ban or whatever it is, during this period of time, but yeah their numbers have gone up fairly precipitously over the last 24 hours so we may be adding that and we may be adding a couple of others and we may frankly start thinking about taking some off."
A total of 798 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the UK so far.
Of that figure, 11 people have died.
Major sports events including all Premier League Football matches and the London Marathon have been postponed due to concerns about the spread of the virus.
In the US, there have been 1,701 confirmed cases and 40 deaths.
On Friday evening, the Director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that Europe is now “the epicentre of the pandemic”.
He issued a stark warning to countries with comparatively low numbers of cases.
Dr Tedros added that more cases of Covid-19 were now being reported every day than were reported in China at the height of its epidemic.
He said: “Our message to countries continues to be, you must take a comprehensive approach. Not testing alone, not contact tracing alone, not quarantine alone, not social distancing alone – do it all.
“Any countries that looks at the experience of other countries with large epidemics and thinks ‘that won’t happen to us’ is making a deadly mistake – it can happen to any country.”
