Malaysia also on Thursday confirmed its first sporadic case, in which infection occurred despite the person neither travelling to an affected area or having contact with another infected person. Sporadic cases indicate the coronavirus has spread into the community.

Similarly, Singapore authorities said they were working to identify 95 citizens who attended the Jhor Qudamak Malaysia 2020 event at Seri Petaling Mosque in Selangor. Other attendees at the event included Indonesians and Filipinos, Malaysian media reported.

Eleven of the cases are linked to the meeting. Several patients had travelled to Brunei while others were their family members who had not travelled to Malaysia. Some 90 people from Brunei attended the event.

Brunei’s first case was a 53-year-old man who returned from Kuala Lumpur on March 3 and started showing symptoms four days later, its health ministry said.

The twelfth case linked to the meeting is a Malaysian, a health official said.

In a bid to stop the spread of the virus, Malaysia’s religious affairs minister has issued guidelines for holding Friday prayers at mosques, including shortening sermons and for the wudhu, or ablution rites, to be carried out at home if possible.

“Those showing symptoms of Covid-19, however, need not attend the prayers, as they are categorised as those who are sick, ” he told a press conference on Thursday, as reported by local newspaper The Star.

Meanwhile, all of the country’s government health personnel have been barred from travelling to China, South Korea, Japan, Italy and Iran, The Star quoted a health ministry official as saying.

Travel to other places would only be approved on a case-by-case basis with “department heads [having] the discretion not to approve applications for leave from their staff”, Dr Chen Chaw Min reportedly said.

Additional reporting by SCMP’s Asia desk