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Employees deliver a body to the Daniel J. Schaefer Funeral Home in New York’s Brooklyn District. The company is equipped to handle 40-60 cases at a time. But amid the coronavirus pandemic, it was taking over 185. (Image: AP)
The United States has recorded 18,586 deaths and is close to the 18,849 death toll in Italy, which has seen the highest number of deaths so far in the global pandemic.
- AFP
- Last update: April 11, 2020 10:36 a.m. IST
Washington: The United States became the first country to record more than 2,000 coronavirus deaths in one day on Friday, with 2,108 deaths in the past 24 hours, according to the Johns Hopkins University count.
The United States has recorded 18,586 deaths and is close to the 18,849 death toll in Italy, which has seen the highest number of deaths so far in the global pandemic.
The United States is also approaching half a million confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 496,535 at 8:30 pm (0030 GMT on Saturday), an increase of 35,098 in the past 24 hours.
The global death toll from coronavirus surpassed 100,000 on Friday when Easter celebrations around the world began in nearly empty churches with billions of people trapped inside to halt the deadly march of the pandemic.
It came as the World Health Organization issued a dire warning that prematurely lifting the blockade restrictions, which affect more than half the planet’s population, could lead to a dangerous resurgence of the disease.
Extraordinary measures from New York to Naples and New Delhi have caused the closure of businesses and schools in a desperate attempt to stop the spread of the virus, and the IMF has said the world is now facing the worst recession since the Great Depression of the decade of the 1930.
More than 1.6 million people have been infected worldwide and the death toll reached 100,859 on Friday, with almost 70 percent of fatal cases in Europe.
