Italy has registered more deaths than anywhere else in the world and accounts for around 30 per cent of all global fatalities from the virus.
Italy's largest daily toll from the epidemic was registered last Friday, when 919 people died. There were 889 deaths on Saturday, 756 on Sunday, 812 on Monday and 837 on Tuesday.
The people of Italy have been under lockdown for three weeks, with most shops, bars and restaurants shut and people restricted from stepping out of their house for all but non-essential needs.
To protect the people from the coronavirus pandemic, the government of Italy has decided to extend the period of nationwide lockdown till April 12 to stem coronavirus infections that have claimed a world-leading 11,591 lives so far.
Coronavirus was first confirmed to have spread to Italy on 31 January 2020, when two Chinese tourists in Rome tested positive for the virus.
One week later an Italian man repatriated back to Italy from the city of Wuhan, China, was hospitalised and confirmed as the third case in Italy
A record 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment last week, a stunning sign of an economic collapse triggered by the pandemic.
On 31 January, the Italian government suspended all flights to and from China and declared a state of emergency.
In February, eleven municipalities in northern Italy were identified as the centres of the two main Italian clusters and placed under quarantine.
The Italian government asked for medical equipment from the European Union mechanism of civil protection.
The first known case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was confirmed on January 20, 2020, in a 35-year-old man who had returned from Wuhan, China, five days earlier.
Meanwhile, spring may have come to the US but it still continues to grapple with the novel Coronavirus.
Medical and healthcare workers wearing a face mask and overalls, prepare to perform drive-through swabbing tests for coronavirus on people arriving by car outside the polyclinic of Alessandria, Piedmont
A woman at the wheel of her car undergoes a drive-through swabbing test for coronavirus outside the polyclinic of Alessandria, Piedmont, on April 2, 2020 during the country's lockdown aimed at curbing the spread of the COVID-19 infection, caused by the novel coronavirus.
In the USA, New York has become the epicentre of the pandemic while cases and deaths are multiplying by the day. Hospital staff is doing double duty in order to deal with the rise in positive cases.
According to CNN, more than 210,000 people in the United States have been infected with coronavirus, and at least 4,703 have died. The number of fatalities again reached a new daily high, with more than 900 casualties on Wednesday.
Most of those deaths have occurred in just the past few days in New York City, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak.
Mayor Ras J. Baraka of Newark announced on Thursday that four cities in New Jersey communities were enacting aggressive measures to slow the spread of the virus and enacted lockdown in Newark, Orange, East Orange and Irvington.
New Jersey now has over 25,000 confirmed virus cases, with 3,500 people testing positive since Wednesday, the governor said.
Two more New York City health care workers have died of the coronavirus, days after the first confirmed death.
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