* Ex-Japan Asian shares up 0.3%, Nikkei loses 0.5%
* Hopes of government stimulus support shares
* Dollar hits 4-month high as investors flee to U.S. assets
* Euro hits 3-year low ahead of euro zone GDP
By Hideyuki Sano
TOKYO, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Asian shares edged up on Friday, on course to post the second straight week of gains, helped by hopes governments will make provisions to soften the impact on their economies from the coronavirus epidemic.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan ticked up 0.3%, led by gains in Hong Kong and South Korea. On the week, the pan-regional index was up 1.94%.
"China is already easing its monetary policy and providing more liquidity while more stimulus is likely. Factories are starting to reopen albeit with some delays," said Yukino Yamada, senior strategist at Daiwa Securities.
Japan's Nikkei dropped 0.55%, not helped by the news of first coronavirus death and signs of a potential rise in domestic human-to-human infections in the country.
On Wall Street on Thursday, the S&P 500 lost 0.16% but its futures gained 0.23% in subsequent Asian trade to hit record levels.
The daily death toll in Hubei, the Chinese province at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, halved and the number of new cases dropped from a record posted the day before.
Ryutaro Kimura, fixed income strategist at Axa Investment Management, expected "considerable impact" on the global economy as China now accounts for around 17% compared to 4% during the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003, and it is integral to more supply chains. "That means countries are likely to keep interest rates low for a longer period, keeping global bond yields low. Such an expectation in turn is supporting the world's share prices."
Market sentiment improved also after World Health Organization official said the big jump in China's reported cases reflects a decision by authorities there to reclassify a backlog of suspected cases by using patients' chest images, and is not necessarily the "tip of an iceberg" of a wider epidemic,
Still, sceptics saw it as undermining confidence in data accuracy, a constant issue in Chinese data.
While many investors hope the epidemic will gradually slow down in coming months, allowing companies and businesses to come back to normal operations, how long that process will take remains anybody's guess.
"Until Wednesday, people had been saying that you can buy shares because the number of new cases had peaked out. The reality seems to be quite different. An early end to this seems improbable," said Norihiro Fujito, chief investment strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities.