A policeman stands guard at a roadblock during the first day of a 21-day government-imposed nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus in New Delhi on Wednesday. India's billion-plus population went into a three-week lockdown on Wednesday, with a third of the world now under orders to stay indoors. Photo: AFP

India's billion-plus population went into a three-week lockdown on Wednesday, with a third of the world now under orders to stay indoors, as the US agreed to spend $2 trillion to counter the economic damage of the coronavirus pandemic.

Financial markets soared as the Senate and the White House thrashed out a stimulus package worth roughly 10 percent of the entire US economy, an injection Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said represented a "wartime level of investment into our nation."

US President Donald Trump has voiced hope that the US would be "raring to go" by mid-April, but his optimism appeared to stand almost alone among world leaders, who were ratcheting up movement restrictions in a bid to stifle the spread of the disease.

India ordered its 1.3 billion people to stay at home for three weeks.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "total lockdown" call doubled the number of people around the globe under some form of movement restriction to more than 2.6 billion people.

Prince Charles is showing mild symptoms of the new coronavirus but "otherwise remains in good health," his office said on Wednesday.

The 71-year-old is self-isolating in Scotland along with his wife Camilla, who was also tested but does not have COVID-19, Clarence House said.

In a separate statement, Buckingham Palace said the queen, 93, was in "good health" and had not seen her son for two weeks.

The pandemic has cut a swathe through the world's sporting and cultural events, and on Tuesday claimed the biggest of them all: the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe tried to sound an optimistic note, vowing that the rescheduled Games in 2021 would be "a testament to mankind's defeat of the new virus."

The postponement marks the first time that the world's biggest sporting event, set to open on July 24, has been delayed in peacetime.

Across the planet, the grim COVID-19 toll mounted further, with more than 19,000 deaths and over 438,000 declared infections, half of them in Europe according to an AFP tally.

The medical situation is still critical in Europe, where hardest-hit Italy had mixed news.

The Mediterranean country's death toll shot back up to 743 after two days of slight decline from a world-record peak of 793 on Saturday. But officially registered new infections rose just eight percent for the second straight day.

Meanwhile about 40 percent of the population, are under or will soon come under some kind of  lockdown order, including in the largest state of California.

Many governments are listening to health experts who warn the only way to slow the epidemic is by imposing "social isolation" measures on a population.

AFP