-- France's COVID-19 deaths top 20,000;

-- Coronavirus cases in Spain top 200,000;

-- Portugal creates Biobank to study COVID-19.

The following are the latest developments of the COVID-19 pandemic in European countries.

ROME -- The coronavirus pandemic has claimed 24,114 lives in locked-down Italy as total active infections fell for the first time since the pandemic broke out in the northern regions on Feb. 21, according to the latest data released Monday by the country's Civil Protection Department.

Addressing a televised press conference, Civil Protection Department Chief Angelo Borrelli said 454 new fatalities were registered over the past 24 hours.

At the same time, a positive signal came from statistics of active infections, which decreased by 20 cases on Monday compared to the previous day, and totalled 108,237 nationwide.

MADRID -- The cumulative number of coronavirus infection cases in Spain surpassed the 200,000 mark, while the daily number of new deaths dropped to 399, the health ministry said on Monday.

Spain's COVID-19 cases rose from 195,944 cases on Sunday to 200,210 on Monday, the ministry said.

Monday's death toll is the lowest registered in the past four weeks, in a sign that the coronavirus pandemic in Spain was slowing down thanks to one of the toughest lockdown measures.

PARIS -- France has registered 20,265 COVID-19 deaths since March 1, becoming the fourth country to surpass 20,000 COVID-19 deaths after the United States, Italy and Spain, Director-General of Health Jerome Salomon announced on Monday.

"Our country crossed a symbolic and particularly painful threshold," said Salomon at the daily briefing on the outbreak.

BERLIN -- Germany reported 1,775 new cases of COVID-19 infection in the past 24 hours, raising the country's cumulative number of infection to 141,672, fresh figures showed on Monday.

A further 110 patients had died of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll to 4,404, according to figures released by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German government agency and research institute responsible for disease control and prevention.

Germany has staggered the rest of the world with an impressively low "case fatality rate," which is the number of deaths divided by the total number of confirmed cases.

LISBON -- The Portuguese Joao Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine has created a Biobank to study COVID-19. By storing biological samples from patients diagnosed with the disease in the country the aim is to create a database that will enable experts to understand why people react differently to the new coronavirus.

"We started a collection because we feel that there is a great interest in characterizing the immune response of different patients to infection by COVID-19," Sergio Dias, co-director of the Biobank and responsible for the initiative, told Xinhua.

"What we intend to do is create a repository of samples from COVID-19 patients, accompanied by respective clinical information, which can later be used in studies of immunological characterization of the response to COVID-19," he explained.

Staff members load a chartered flight of Xiamen Airlines with medical supplies to be delivered to the Netherlands, in Nanchang, east China's Jiangxi Province, April 12, 2020. (Xinhua/Zhang Haobo)

THE HAGUE -- Dutch Minister for Medical Care Martin van Rijn personally welcomed an aircraft from China with 800,000 face masks for medical personnel at the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport on Monday morning.

The protective equipment against the novel coronavirus arrived via a Boeing 747 from Shanghai. It was the first flight of an airbridge between the Netherlands and China for the transport of medical equipment and masks. In total, 6 million face masks are expected to arrive from China in the forthcoming days.

"Great news that there is now an airbridge for protective equipment with China," Van Rijn said on Twitter. "The first flight of this was welcomed last night at Schiphol with hundreds of thousands of masks, 30,000 coats and 30,000 safety glasses. More will follow in the coming days, including millions of masks."