VIDEO: Spanish police officers sing, dance to cheer up neighbourhood on coronavirus lockdown

A heartwarming video has emerged of local police in Spain singing and dancing along with neighbours who join in from their windows and balconies where they appear to be self-isolating due to coronavirus.

The video shows a small street in Algaida, Majorca, where two police cars appear with their sirens on to people's applause. They then park their cars and get out with one of them brandishing a guitar. He shouts: “We've come to sing!”

The five police officers then proceed to count the street into a sing-along of "Joan Petit," a common Catalan children song which functions in a similar way to "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" does in English.

The one with the guitar leads the singing, the other four clap and dance, while neighbours throughout the street do the same. According to the local newspaper (Diario de Mallorca), one of the officers is part of a singing group, and they plan to continue singing to citizens across the area on Sunday, as advertised on their social media platforms (which may explain why some of the neighbours seemed unsurprised by the impromptu show).

The video was originally posted to Twitter by user Ada Jo March, although she didn't take the footage herself. It has now been viewed over 140,000 times and reached local television stations on Saturday night.

When retweeted by a British person, the responses pointed out the cultural barriers to anything like that happening in the UK.

Earlier in the day, Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said he would ask parliament to extend a state of emergency until April 11 to try to curb the spread of coronavirus after the country recorded 394 new deaths from the disease.

Dozens of coronavirus patients were moved on Sunday to a makeshift field hospital set up at a Madrid conference centre to be fitted with 5,500 hospital beds, which would make it the biggest such facility in Europe.