Frontline medical staff in coronavirus-hit Italy are to benefit from millions of face masks sent by China and France, foreign minister Luigi Di Maio stated Wednesday on Facebook.
"With the help of the Red Cross, a delivery of a million face masks and 100,000 (testing) kits has arrived from China to tackle the coronavirus emergency and support our doctors, nurses and other health workers," Di Maio wrote on Facebook.
Several countries have shown solidarity with Italy, Di Maio underlined.
"France, for example, will give Italy a million face masks and 20,000 sets of medical scrubs," Di Maio went on.
"We are hard at work - it's an intense time," he wrote.
Di Maio's post also cited a new United States funded 68-bed field hospital set up in the northern city of Cremona. The surrounding Lombardy region is the epicentre of Italy's dramatic coronavirus outbreak - the world's worst after China.
Of 28,710 confirmed cases of Covid-19, 12,266 were in Lombardy, according to figures issued by Italy's civil protection agency on Wednesday.
The Covid-19 death toll in Italy has reached 2,978 as the country's health services struggle to cope with the epidemic amid a nationwide lockdown.
