The COVID-19 death toll in Spain yesterday surged past 10,000 after a record 950 deaths in 24 hours, while New York rushed to bring in an army of medical volunteers as the statewide death toll grew to more than 2,190.
The global number of people diagnosed with the illness edged closer to 1 million yesterday.
Spain has the world’s second-highest death toll after Italy, with the virus so far claiming 10,003 lives, although the rate of new infections and deaths continued its downward trend, Spanish Ministry of Health figures showed.
Photo: AFP
“The data show the curve has stabilized” and the epidemic has entered a “slowdown” phase, Spanish Minister of Health Salvador Illa said.
In the US, the nation’s biggest city was the hardest hit, with bodies loaded onto refrigerated morgue trucks by forklifts and gurneys outside overwhelmed hospitals.
The wail of ambulances in the otherwise eerily quiet streets of the city became the heartbreaking soundtrack of the crisis.
“It’s like a battlefield behind your home,” said 33-year-old Emma Sorza, who could hear the sirens from severely swamped Elmhurst Hospital in Queens.
“How does it end? And people want answers,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday. “I want answers. The answer is nobody knows for sure.”
US President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that a federal stockpile was nearly depleted of personal protective equipment used by doctors and nurses, and warned of trying times to come.
“Difficult days are ahead for our nation,” Trump said. “We’re going to have a couple of weeks, starting pretty much now, but especially a few days from now that are going to be horrific.”
Altogether, close to 940,000 people worldwide have contracted the virus, according to a tally being kept by Johns Hopkins University. More than 47,280 people have died from the virus, which emerged in China late last year.
The real figures are believed to be much higher because of testing shortages, differences in counting the dead and large numbers of mild cases that have gone unreported.
European nations facing high demand for intensive care beds were putting up makeshift hospitals, unsure whether they would find enough healthy medical staff to run them.
London is days away from unveiling a 4,000-bed temporary hospital built in a huge convention center.
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