More than 250,000 COVID-19 cases reported outside China - Today's coronavirus news and analysis

As coronavirus continues to spread across the globe, here are some of the latest headlines and resources to help you arm yourself with the best information.

COVID-19’s impact around the globe

Doctors fighting COVID-19 in Italy: Decentralize care to reduce transmission

Doctors fighting coronavirus in Italy, a country overwhelmed by the disease, stress that COVID-19 care should be decentralized, taken away from main hospitals and into homes or mobile clinics. In an article published Saturday, a group of doctors wrote that some hospitals in Italy have become sources of infection, and ambulances and personnel can unknowingly help carry the disease to other parts of the community.

Many modern medical systems, like those in the U.S., are centralized, hospital-focused, and patient-centered and, as one of the authors told Stat, "the virus exploits this." Read more here.

McDonald's to close its UK restaurants

All 1,270 of McDonalds' UK restaurants in the UK will shut by Monday's close, the company announced, reports the BBC. The restaurants employ approximately 135,000 people in the UK. Direct staff will receive full pay for any scheduled hours through 5 April. After that, a new UK government aid package could apply, paying staff 80% of their wages. Read more here.

An emergency responder to Ebola shares tips for health workers fighting COVID-19

In an essay for Stat, an emergency physician who fought the Ebola crisis shared perspectives on fighting a major health epidemic, explaining how health workers fighting infectious disease can be treated as pariahs among family and friends and that rationing care is rarely rational (with guidelines difficult to apply to patients' unique conditions). Writes the author, "It will always be harder to take someone off a ventilator than put someone on one, regardless of who needs it most." Read more here.

What does it mean to recover from coronavirus?

While more than 330,000 cases have been reported in more than 192 countries and territories, many survive. The CDC defines recovery from COVID-19 as an absence of fever, with no use of fever-reducing medication, for three full days; improvement in other symptoms, such as coughing and shortness of breath; and a period of seven full days since symptoms first appeared.

In hard hit areas, with the right controls, recoveries can outpace new cases. Some patients will not escape unscathed, however. The Hong Kong Hospital Authority observed that two out of three of its recovering patients had between 20% and 30% of lung function - something that could be treated with physiotherapy. Read more here.