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Global cases of coronavirus neared the grim milestone of two million on Monday night as lockdowns continued or were extended in nations across the world to slow the spread of the virus, Euronews reported. 

French President Emmanuel Macron announced the extension of France's lockdown - which has been in place since March 17 to May 11. The latest figures show the virus has killed 14,967 people in France, including more than 9,000 in hospital.

The UK announced that more than 11,000 people have died just one day after the country's leader, Boris Johnson, was discharged from hospital where he was suffering with COVID-19.

In other badly-affected states, lockdown rules were relaxed: In Spain, employees in some industries were allowed to return to work after a two-week shutdown.

But the World Health Organization warned countries considering lifting lockdowns against COVID-19 should do so only slowly and "with control".

"It cannot happen all at once," WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a daily news briefing.

"While COVID-19 accelerates very fast, it decelerates much more slowly. In other words, the way down is much slower than the way up," he said.

An online dashboard that tracks the global number of confirmed coronavirus cases, maintained by Johns Hopkins University, late Monday night showed the number of cases at than 2 million.

The site was later adjusted to state 1.9 million cases worldwide. It was not immediately clear why the numbers changed. Of those 1.9 million cases, nearly 120,000 people have died, while nearly 449,600 have recovered.

The number of cases in the US is now more than 587,000, with 23,644 deaths.