World Health Organisation (WHO) has assured Pakistan of providing 100 thermal scanners to check passengers at airports following outbreak of deadly coronavirus in China.

The government has requested the world body for thermal scanners as it did not have enough scanners to cover all the airports.

On Wednesday, the government confirmed that four Pakistani students studying in Wuhan city of China had been infected by coronavirus. Around 500 Pakistani students were based in Wuhan, the epicentre of the deadly virus.

Meanwhile, the WHO, which initially downplayed the severity of the disease that has now killed 170 throughout China, warned all governments to be "on alert" as it weighed whether to declare a global health emergency.

As foreign countries evacuated their citizens from China’s Wuhan, the locked-down city where the virus was first detected, concern over the economic impact has steadily intensified.

Airlines have suspended services to China and companies from Starbucks to Tesla have shuttered stores and production lines.

Chinese authorities have taken extraordinary steps to arrest the virus's spread, including effectively locking down more than 50 million people in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province. But that was yet to pay dividends, with the government reporting 38 new deaths in the 24 hours to Thursday, the highest one-day total. All but one were in Hubei.

The number of confirmed new cases also grew steadily to 7,711, the National Health Commission said. Another 81,000 people were under observation for possible infection.