Sitting on the front row US Vice President Mike Pence and response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force Deborah Birx listen to US President Donald Trump speak during a daily briefing on COVID-19 in the Rose Garden at the White House on Tuesday in Washington DC. Photo: AFP

US President Donald Trump ordered a freeze on funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) for "mismanaging" the coronavirus crisis, as world leaders weighed easing lockdowns that threaten to tip the global economy into a second Great Depression.

The death toll from the pandemic has topped 127,000, with over two million people infected by the disease that has upended society and changed lives for billions confined to their homes around the globe.

World leaders are agonizing over when to lift lockdown measures to jump-start devastated economies but still avoid a second wave of infections.

With the world also battling to get on top of the pandemic, the US president fired a broadside at the WHO and halted payments that amounted to $400 million last year.

The president's controversial attack came as the US counted a record of 2,228 victims over the past 24 hours, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The International Monetary Fund laid bare the scale of the economic catastrophe, saying the "Great Lockdown" could wipe $9 trillion from the global economy in its worst downturn since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

With tentative hope the pandemic could be past its peak in some European hot spots, many countries are gradually lifting restrictions - to mixed reception.

Italy, one of the hardest-hit nations, allowed bookshops, laundromats, stationers and children's clothing retailers to re-open, but many business owners chose to stay shut.

"Open in a desert? Why?  Opening a business where no one walks by is dangerous from every point of view," said Cristina Di Caio, a bookshop owner in Milan. 

Spain has allowed work to restart in some factories and construction sites, Denmark opened schools on Wednesday after a month-long closure while Germany was expected to ease some lockdown measures.

Also Wednesday, the European Union is poised to suggest a coordinated "road map" for member states to exit the lockdown.

Citizens elsewhere, however, braced for several more weeks of restrictions - including in India, whose 1.3 billion people will remain in lockdown until May 3 despite uproar from the unsupported poor.

As the virus appeared to be on the retreat in some parts of more affluent Europe, it is slowly taking hold in Africa, which has seen 15,000 cases and 800 deaths continent-wide.

"A lockdown is unenforceable and unsustainable across much of Africa," said Jakkie Cilliers at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS).

"You are trying to do something that is not possible, and you are condemning people to a choice between starving and getting sick," he said.

A similar crisis is emerging in Ecuador, where hunger trumps fear of the virus for residents in rundown areas of the badly affected city of Guayaquil. 

AFP