Madrid and London are facing worse coronavirus outbreaks than Lombardy in Italy with deaths doubling every two days – but New York’s mortality rate could be set to outpace them all.
New analysis of the number of deaths shows the number of fatalities in certain cities is fast outstripping the average mortality rate for even the countries they are in.
In London, deaths double every two days, a day faster than the average across Britain, the research by the Financial Times shows.
The humanitarian cost of the pandemic continues to mount globally as more than 415,000 people have been infected with the deadly disease, and more than 18,000 have been killed.
Lombardy, Italy, replaced Wuhan in China, as the most badly impacted region in the world, with authorities in the European country announcing that 743 more people had died in the country on Tuesday, bringing the total dead to 6,820.
Italian authorities believe some of the restrictive measures taken may be beginning to have an impact after officially registered new infections rose by just eight percent, the same percentage increase as Monday- the lowest level since Italy registered its first death on February 21.
The trajectory of the rapidly spreading virus shows that Madrid and London could become the next hotspots of the disease, with deaths now doubling every two days in the respective capital cities.
In the UK, 87 more patients died overnight in England, including 21 at the one NHS trust in London. The UK’s death toll has risen almost six-fold in the space of a week, with just 71 fatalities recorded last Tuesday.
And in Spain the armed forces asked NATO for humanitarian assistance to fight the novel coronavirus as the national death toll touched 2,700 and infections soared towards 40,000.
The Madrid region has suffered the brunt of the epidemic with 12,352 infections – just under a third of the total – and 1,535 deaths, or 57 percent of the national figure.
Outside of Europe, in the United States, the death toll has risen quite slowly compared to other nations so far, but the trajectory for New York’s mortality curve is much steeper, suggesting it could overtake Madrid.
More than 12,000 people have tested positive in the city and 125 have died. A state-wide lockdown took effect on Sunday night.
Health officials say the US is also on track to eventually overtake China’s infections. The US last week was already reporting more new daily cases of coronavirus than China did at the apparent peak of the outbreak there.
In India more than 2.6 billion people worldwide are in lockdown after the country introduced its measures to fight the coronavirus pandemic at 1830 GMT, more than one-third of a global population.
In Senegal, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone come under state of emergency and nightime curfew and Egypt will impose a night-time curfew for two weeks from Wednesday.
The COVID-19 outbreak in the United States has the potential to exceed that in Europe and become the new epicentre of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) warns.