With warmer weather beckoning, Italians are straining against a strict lockdown to halt the coronavirus that is just now showing signs of ebbing at the end of five weeks of mass isolation.

Italy was the first Western democracy to be hit by the virus, and it has suffered the most deaths of any nation: nearly 19,000. Now it is likely to set an example of how to lift broad restrictions that have imposed the harshest peacetime limits on personal freedom and shut down all nonessential industry.

A new study examining air samples from hospital wards with COVID-19 patients has found the virus can travel up to 13 feet (four meters) -- twice the distance current guidelines say people should leave between themselves in public.

More than half of a group of severely ill coronavirus patients improved after receiving an experimental antiviral drug, although there's no way to know the odds of that happening without the drug because there was no comparison group, doctors reported Friday.

The results published by the New England Journal of Medicine are the first in COVID-19 patients for remdesivir. The Gilead Sciences drug has shown promise against other coronaviruses in the past and in lab tests against the one causing the current pandemic, which now has claimed more than 100,000 lives.

The number of coronavirus cases recorded in the United States surged past 500,000 late Friday, according to the latest tally by Johns Hopkins University.

Cheered by her doctors, 93-year-old Alye Gunduz was discharged from an Istanbul hospital after recovering from the novel coronavirus following 10 days of treatment. 

The first person to officially die from the novel coronavirus was a 61-year-old Chinese man from Wuhan on January 9. Now, three months later, by April 10, more than 100,000 people have succumbed to the disease.

Spain has recorded its lowest daily death toll from the new coronavirus in 17 days, with 605 people dying, the government said on Friday.

The World Health Organization on Friday denied having brushed off a Taiwanese warning on human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus soon after its outbreak in China late last year. 

U.S. health officials made cautiously optimistic noises about coronavirus despite high death tolls Thursday, suggesting Americans might be able to take summer holidays, as falling hospitalization rates hint at a turning point in the battle against COVID-19.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte was reportedly ready Friday to extend most measures of Italy's month-long lockdown until early May in order to avoid a second coronavirus wave.